Labs & Facilities

• Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratory
• Marine Renewable Energy Laboratory
• Perceptual Robotics Laboratory
• Marine Structures Design Laboratory
• Deep Robot Optical Perception Lab
• Real-time Adaptive Control Engineering Lab

Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratory

The Marine Hydrodynamics Laboratory (MHL) is used in several group courses and for individual directed studies is located on the first floor of West Hall on main campus. Its facilities include:

• Main model basin
• Low turbulence free surface water channel
• Gravity-capillary water wave tank
• Propeller tunnel

Marine Renewable Energy Laboratory

The Marine Renewable Energy Laboratory (MRELab) is dedicated to developing technology to harness the abundant, clean, and renewable marine energy in an environmentally sustainable way and at a competitive cost. The current focus of the MRELab is to study the underlying science of the VIVACE Converter, which was invented in the MRELab (three patents pending) to harness the hydrokinetic energy of ocean/river currents/tides.

Perceptual Robotics Laboratory

The Perceptual Robotics Laboratory (PeRL) at the University of Michigan studies problems related to autonomous navigation and mapping for mobile robots with a focus on computer vision techniques for perceptual sensing.

Marine Structures Design Laboratory

The Marine Structures Design Laboratory (MSDL) is a growing group of faculty and students focused on developing the next generation of structural design and analysis tools for the marine industry. Its ongoing work includes:

• Creating rapid and accurate strength methods for lightweight aluminum marine structures
• Building unique evolutionary optimization approaches for rapid trade-space exploration of structural designs
• Developing novel tools to allow in-service re-assessment of structures and updatable forecasting of lifecycle cost, reliability, and capability.

Deep Robot Optical Perception Lab

The DROP (Deep Robot Optical Perception) Lab’s research goal is to develop robotic systems capable of operating in complex dynamic environments. To this end, we seek to expand and improve the perceptual capabilities of autonomous systems. Our work seeks to push the bounds of scale and resolution in 3D reconstruction, segmentation, data mining, and visualization for massive datasets gathered with robotic systems. We expect to continue to advance research in robotic perception, which we believe has the potential to develop new robotic task domains.

Real-time Adaptive Control Engineering Lab

Real-time Adaptive Control Engineering Lab (RACELab) was established by Professor Jing Sun to support advanced research and graduate education for marine system control and optimization. The lab is equipped with state-of-the-art real-time simulation and control rapid prototyping technologies. An 8-node Opal-RT simulator and several programmable power supplies and loads form a reconfigurable platform for real-time simulation, control rapid prototyping and optimization algorithm validation. Two test-beds are currently housed in the RACELab: an all-electric ship power system simulator with fuel cell and gas turbine power emulators and a fully instrumented scaled model ship controlled by PC104 real-time system.