URIs_MOMENTUM_Research_and_Innovation_Magazine_Spring_2024_M

CHRISTINE DE SILVA ‘26

KOTACHI LIU ‘24 Ph.D. Candidate Ocean Engineering CEO, MesoLink

Ph.D. Candidate, Graduate School of Oceanography CEO and Co-founder, Juice Robotics

Through her status as a Patents2Products fellow and support from Professor Andrew Davies’ Marine Ecology Technology lab at GSO, de Silva is building out Juice Robotics’ existing suite of simple-to-use sensors, called Cells, that can be clicked together like LEGO pieces. She’s learned many lessons from the initiative including the cohort’s unofficial mantra: love the problem, not the solution. To her, it means being passionate about the problem and not so fixated on any one particular solution to the extent that you close off other possibilities. “They ended up putting that on a T-shirt for us,” she says. “The end solution or product becomes secondary and is based on the problem, not vice versa.”

KOTACHI LIU MESOLINK

Kotachi Liu is exploring new ways to communicate in undersea environments with his company, MesoLink. “It’s hard to accomplish tasks in the ocean,” he says. “It’s hard to see, it’s easy to get lost, and battery life constrains how much time there is.” When deploying underwater vessels now—for example, to locate a lost vehicle or for oil and gas exploration— companies send off a single vehicle at a time with its own instructions and must wait until it resurfaces or the end of the mission to debrief. A Ph.D. student in ocean engineering, Liu is developing technology that would allow vehicles to communicate with each other in real-time, taking advantage of each other’s sensors to work together more efficiently, resulting in cost savings. “Usually within a team, there’s going to be one vehicle that has better navigation than all the other ones,” Liu says. “If this information is communicated to the other members of the team, the entire group’s navigation can be improved beyond what was possible if they acted independently.”

“It’s hard to accomplish tasks in the ocean, it’s hard to see. It’s easy to get lost, and battery life constrains how much time there is.”

- Kotachi Liu

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