Dr. Nina Mahmoudian has applied her knowledge about flight in the atmosphere or outer space to the underwater world, designing better unmanned vehicles that take water samples or search the floors of oceans and lakes.
In 2011, Mahmoudian began her first faculty job at Michigan Technological University with advanced degrees in aerospace engineering, but as an assistant professor of mechanical engineering-engineering mechanics there, she has devoted her research to underwater vehicles. The scientific distance between the two fields is a lot shorter than the distance between the different environments.
“For me, the fact that I deal with an airplane or an underwater glider — it looks the same. It’s fluid, just different densities and different environmental challenges and interactions,” Mahmoudian explains. “They are the same physical concepts that apply.”
A pioneering aspect of her multidisciplinary research on “autonomous underwater vehicles” involves figuring out how to keep them in continuous operation. She cites the example of the underwater probe that, while searching the Indian Ocean for the crashed Malaysian Airlines plane, had to return to a ship to recharge its battery.
“The focus of my research is to find a way to recharge on the fly. This will cut down on the cost of operation,” Mahmoudian says.
That technology is in early stages of development. The solution involves overcoming hardware and software challenges for autonomous energy replenishment in dynamic environments.
Another possibility Mahmoudian cites, in the case of multiple vehicles mapping a large area of water, is deploying multiple chargers in the vicinity. That is a networking problem she compares to the coordinated movements of a school of fish, as each vehicle would have to dock with a charger on a schedule.
