The SWIMMER: a System for underWater Imaging and Monitoring for Marine Environment Research

The Basking Shark (Cetorhinus maximus) is an elusive creature that possesses a highly-specialized filter-feeding system capable of filtering around two million liters of water every hour. Learning from such filters could be instrumental in making new filtration systems for microplastics or pollutants in the future. However, the specific filtration mechanism, as well as many other aspects of their morphology and behavior, is not well understood. There are numerous difficulties involved with the study of basking sharks, particularly finding the sharks in their ocean habitat and observing them without disturbing them. Here, we present a new open-source robotic platform, the System for underWater Imaging and Monitoring for Marine Environment Research (SWIMMER, SWIM for short), for non-invasive underwater imaging. The robot was designed to produce high-resolution stereo images at both surface level and underwater. The imaging payload is carried by a surface robot to make it easy to monitor, control, and retrieve. The robot is built low-cost and entirely from off-the-shelf components and 3D printing to enable us to scale up the robot to a swarm in the future for imaging from multiple points of view and for other marine applications. To demonstrate the platform, we show its use in recent field trials where we were able to collect video data of 9 different individuals in 6 different encounters, 3 encounters involved 2 sharks, as well as collecting data about its capabilities. This work has the potential to provide new insights into basking shark feeding behavior, as well as potentially making marine swarm robotics more accessible to researchers everywhere due to the low cost and ease of construction of the SWIMMERs.