Safe Connectivity Maintenance in Underactuated Multi-Agent Networks for Dynamic Oceanic Environments

Autonomous Multi-Agent Systems are increasingly being deployed in environments where winds and ocean currents can exert a significant influence on their dynamics. Recent work has developed powerful control policies for single agents that can leverage flows to achieve their objectives in dynamic environments. However, in the context of multi-agent systems, these flows can cause agents to collide or drift apart and lose direct inter-agent communications, especially when agents have low propulsion capabilities. To address these challenges, we propose a Hierarchical Multi-Agent Control approach that allows arbitrary single agent performance policies that are unaware of other agents to be used in multi-agent systems, while ensuring safe operation. We first develop a safety controller solely dedicated to avoiding collisions and maintaining inter-agent communication. Subsequently, we design a low-interference safe interaction (LISIC) policy that trades-off the performance policy and the safety controller to ensure safe and optimal operation. Specifically, when the agents are at an appropriate distance, LISIC prioritizes the performance policy, while smoothly increasing the safety controller when necessary. We prove that under mild assumptions on the flows experienced by the agents our approach can guarantee safety. Additionally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method in realistic settings through an extensive empirical analysis with underactuated Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASV) operating in dynamical ocean currents where the assumptions do not always hold.Comment: 8 pages, submitted to 2023 IEEE 62th Annual Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) Nicolas Hoischen and Marius Wiggert contributed equally to this wor

A seasonal succession of physical/biological interaction mechanisms in the Sargasso Sea

Six months of concurrent, co-located physical and bio-optical time series from a moored array deployed in the Sargasso Sea during 1987 have been analyzed by combining standard Fourier analysis techniques with a unique presentation method. The spectral information obtained from the time series analysis covers four orders of magnitude in frequency space. This is especially useful for revealing temporal variations in high frequency variance and the physical/biological interactions that occur at these frequencies. The presentation method used here consists of time/frequency distributions of normalized variance and squared coherence that resulted from the time series analysis. These reveal a seasonal succession of physical/biological interaction mechanisms. It is apparent that the onset, and ongoing development, of water-column stratification initiates an evolution from a regime dominated by horizontal advection, within which phytoplankton act as a passive tracer, to one where physical processes impact the biology on spatial and temporal scales which are consonant with phytoplankton physiology. The observed interactions include: (1) transport of distinct bio-optical properties within advected mesoscale features; (2) significant phytoplankton patchiness associated with the regional evolution of the spring bloom and; (3) high frequency bio-optical variability associated with the interaction of the deep chlorophyll maximum with internal wave motions

Satellite Evidence of Hurricane-Induced Phytoplankton Blooms in an Oceanic Desert

The physical effects of hurricanes include deepening of the mixed layer and decreasing of the sea surface temperature in response to entrainment, curl-induced upwelling, and increased upper ocean cooling. However, the biological effects of hurricanes remain relatively unexplored. In this paper, we examine the passages of 13 hurricanes through the Sargasso Sea region of the North Atlantic during the years 1998 through 2001. Remotely sensed ocean color shows increased concentrations of surface chlorophyll within the cool wakes of the hurricanes, apparently in response to the injection of nutrients and/or biogenic pigments into the oligotrophic surface waters. This increase in post-storm surface chlorophyll concentration usually lasted 2-3 weeks before it returned to its nominal pre-hurricane level

Maximizing Seaweed Growth on Autonomous Farms: A Dynamic Programming Approach for Underactuated Systems Navigating on Uncertain Ocean Currents

Seaweed biomass offers significant potential for climate mitigation, but large-scale, autonomous open-ocean farms are required to fully exploit it. Such farms typically have low propulsion and are heavily influenced by ocean currents. We want to design a controller that maximizes seaweed growth over months by taking advantage of the non-linear time-varying ocean currents for reaching high-growth regions. The complex dynamics and underactuation make this challenging even when the currents are known. This is even harder when only short-term imperfect forecasts with increasing uncertainty are available. We propose a dynamic programming-based method to efficiently solve for the optimal growth value function when true currents are known. We additionally present three extensions when as in reality only forecasts are known: (1) our methods resulting value function can be used as feedback policy to obtain the growth-optimal control for all states and times, allowing closed-loop control equivalent to re-planning at every time step hence mitigating forecast errors, (2) a feedback policy for long-term optimal growth beyond forecast horizons using seasonal average current data as terminal reward, and (3) a discounted finite-time Dynamic Programming (DP) formulation to account for increasing ocean current estimate uncertainty. We evaluate our approach through 30-day simulations of floating seaweed farms in realistic Pacific Ocean current scenarios. Our method demonstrates an achievement of 95.8% of the best possible growth using only 5-day forecasts. This confirms the feasibility of using low-power propulsion and optimal control for enhanced seaweed growth on floating farms under real-world conditions.Comment: 8 pages, submitted to 2023 IEEE 62th Annual Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) Matthias Killer and Marius Wiggert contributed equally to this wor

The Role of Feeding Behavior in Sustaining Copepod Populations in the Tropical Ocean

A fundamental question regarding marine copepods is how the many species coexist and persist in the oligotrophic environment (i.e. Hutchinson’s paradox). This question is addressed with a stochastic, object-oriented Lagrangian model that explicitly simulates the distinct foraging behaviors of three prominent tropical species: Clausocalanus furcatus, Paracalanus aculeatus and Oithona plumifera. The model also individually tracks all prey cells. Each particle’s motion combines sinking, turbulent diffusion and active swimming when applicable. The model successfully simulates observed size partitioned carbon uptake rates. Based on the model results, the wide-ranging translational ambit employed by C. furcatus is best suited for the acquisition of passive prey while the relatively stationary behavior of O. plumifera promotes the capture of larger, quickly sinking cells. The model results further suggest that the slow velocities and feeding current employed by P. aculeatus are best suited for acquiring the smallest cells though it also has a slight advantage over C. furcatus in acquiring the largest prey. A resource threshold, at a prey concentration of 530 cells mL–1,is consistently exhibited by all three modeled species. Overall, these results imply that the size-partition preferences due to their different foraging behavior contribute to the coexistence of these three species. (c) The Author 2005

Ocean- Atmosphere Interactions During Cyclone Nargis

Cyclone Nargis (Figure 1a) made landfall in Myanmar (formerly Burma) on 2 May 2008 with sustained winds of approximately 210 kilometers per hour, equivalent to a category 3– 4 hurricane. In addition, Nargis brought approximately 600 millimeters of rain and a storm surge of 3– 4 meters to the low- lying and densely populated Irrawaddy River delta. In its wake, the storm left an estimated 130,000 dead or missing and more than $10 billion in economic losses. It was the worst natural disaster to strike the Indian Ocean region since the 26 December 2004 tsunami and the worst recorded natural disaster ever to affect Myanmar

Leak detection in pipelines using the damping of fluid transients

© 2002 American Society of Civil EngineersLeaks in pipelines contribute to damping of transient events. That fact leads to a method of finding location and magnitude of leaks. Because the problem of transient flow in pipes is nearly linear, the solution of the governing equations can be expressed in terms of a Fourier series. All Fourier components are damped uniformly by steady pipe friction, but each component is damped differently in the presence of a leak. Thus, overall leak-induced damping can be divided into two parts. The magnitude of the damping indicates the size of a leak, whereas different damping ratios of the various Fourier components are used to find the location of a leak. This method does not require rigorous determination and modeling of boundary conditions and transient behavior in the pipeline. The technique is successful in detecting, locating, and quantifying a 0.1% size leak with respect to the cross-sectional area of a pipeline.Xiao-Jian Wang, Martin F. Lambert, Angus R. Simpson, James A. Liggett, and John P. Vitkovsk

Enzymatic Regulation of Protein-Protein Interactions in Artificial Cells

Membraneless organelles are important for spatial organization of proteins and regulation of intracellular processes. Proteins can be recruited to these condensates by specific protein–protein or protein–nucleic acid interactions, which are often regulated by post-translational modifications. However, the mechanisms behind these dynamic, affinity-based protein recruitment events are not well understood. Here, a coacervate system that incorporates the 14-3-3 scaffold protein to study enzymatically regulated recruitment of 14-3-3-binding proteins is presented, which mostly bind in a phosphorylation-dependent manner. Synthetic coacervates are efficiently loaded with 14-3-3, and phosphorylated binding partners, such as the c-Raf pS233/pS259 peptide (c-Raf), show 14-3-3-dependent sequestration with up to 161-fold increase in local concentration. The c-Raf domain is fused to green fluorescent protein (GFP-c-Raf) to demonstrate recruitment of proteins. In situ phosphorylation of GFP-c-Raf by a kinase leads to enzymatically regulated uptake. The introduction of a phosphatase into coacervates preloaded with the phosphorylated 14-3-3-GFP-c-Raf complex results in a significant cargo efflux mediated by dephosphorylation. Finally, the general applicability of this platform to study protein–protein interactions is demonstrated by the phosphorylation-dependent and 14-3-3-mediated active reconstitution of a split-luciferase inside artificial cells. This work presents an approach to study dynamically regulated protein recruitment in condensates, using native interaction domains.</p

Prokaryotic nanocompartments form synthetic organelles in a eukaryote

Compartmentalization of proteins into organelles is a promising strategy for enhancing the productivity of engineered eukaryotic organisms. However, approaches that co-opt endogenous organelles may be limited by the potential for unwanted crosstalk and disruption of native metabolic functions. Here, we present the construction of synthetic non-endogenous organelles in the eukaryotic yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, based on the prokaryotic family of self-assembling proteins known as encapsulins. We establish that encapsulins self-assemble to form nanoscale compartments in yeast, and that heterologous proteins can be selectively targeted for compartmentalization. Housing destabilized proteins within encapsulin compartments afford protection against proteolytic degradation in vivo, while the interaction between split protein components is enhanced upon co-localization within the compartment interior. Furthermore, encapsulin compartments can support enzymatic catalysis, with substrate turnover observed for an encapsulated yeast enzyme. Encapsulin compartments therefore represent a modular platform, orthogonal to existing organelles, for programming synthetic compartmentalization in eukaryotes