Unmanned surface vessels (USVs) are water-borne vessels that are capable of operating on the surface of the water without any onboard human operators. USVs can operate in confined areas (ports, harbours, marinas, etc.) to conduct demanding and challenging missions such as port dredging survey, berth clearance monitoring and marine infrastructure maintenance, with significant benefits including reduced risk to personnel, improved spatial-temporal efficiency and increased operation endurance. However, when operating in confined marine environments, current USVs are usually remotely controlled. This is because in contrast to navigating in public waterways, confined marine environments are highly dynamic (the locations of docked/moored vessels in a port may be constantly changing) making static nautical charts or satellite and aerial imagery less useful for navigation. Such a factor makes the confined marine environment more highly unknown and associated with high levels of uncertainties. Autonomous exploration, as a process that can map an unknown confined environment in an automatic way, has therefore become critical to USV operation in unknown confined marine environments. Current state-of-the-art autonomous exploration strategy employed by USVs is to leverage the Simultaneous Localisation And Mapping (SLAM) technology to build a map of an environment using sensory data without any prior information. Since SLAM is a passive process, regular teleoperation with human operators guiding the map-building process is required for existing USV platforms, making the exploration not fully autonomous. To make the SLAM based autonomous exploration an active process, planning functionality including two modules, i.e., a utility evaluation module and a path generation/selection module, has to be integrated. However, current studies about utility evaluation and path generation cannot address the issues caused by the sparse landmarks in a marine environment, which will compromise the exploration accuracy and efficiency. This research therefore aims to develop a new active autonomous exploration framework using probabilistic inference based utility evaluation and path generation/selection. More specifically, we will construct a pseudo map which contains virtual landmarks as a proxy for an unknown confined marine environment with sparse real landmarks, and evaluate uncertainties as per marginal posterior distributions of poses and positions of virtual landmarks, respectively, using Bayesian probabilistic inference. We also propose to design a new Gaussian Process (GP) based path generation algorithm for autonomous exploration and solve the path generation problem as probabilistic inference on a factor graph. A cross-entropy optimisation method will be adapted to the path planning to enable efficient derivation of the GP mean and covariance updating rules by taking into account nonlinear constraints such as USVs' manoeuvrability. Of key importance for the success of this work is the international collaboration with a leading marine robotics expert, Prof. Brendan Englot, Stevens Institute of Technology, to jointly develop the framework. This work will also have a close collaboration with experienced industrial partners, including Port of London Authority (PLA) and BMT Group Ltd. By working closely with PLA and BMT, innovations generated from this research will be implemented on the Otter USV to conduct use-case demonstrations (e.g., hydrographic survey) on the Tidal Thames. And the long-term vision of this international collaboration is to establish a strong UK-US research consortium on future marine innovations in advanced sensors, AI/machine learning and robotics to work collaboratively with more academic institutions, companies and regulators/organisations.

ResAnth addresses the interlinked risks of climate change, coastal flooding and erosion, and the UK's historic waste legacy for coastal community and ecosystem resilience. Coastal flooding and erosion will accelerate under climate change. Our past industrialisation has left a pollution legacy of over 1,700 historic coastal landfills and 3,000 hectares of contaminated land also at risk from coastal flooding and/or erosion (CCC 2018; POST 2021). By 2100 the number of people exposed to coastal floods and erosion, and therefore legacy coastal waste, will increase significantly and almost half legacy waste sites are within 100m of environmentally sensitive areas such as protected wetlands or bathing waters (Brand et al. 2018). Many sites are already eroding, releasing pollution, plastics, asbestos and/or medical waste into our coastal environments with limited understanding of pollution risk to people or the marine environment. Without intervention one in 10 could erode by 2055. Many UK coastal landfills are at increasing future risk e.g., at Lyme Regis, the Spittles Lane landfill contains 50,000 tonnes of waste on an eroding cliff top and will "almost certainly erode" releasing material to the beach without intervention (Nichols et al. 2020). How we manage the intergenerational burden of our past coastal waste disposal and its accelerated risk to society and ecosystems in a changing climate is a "burning imperative" (Environment Agency 2022). In a "call to arms", coastal Local Authorities have identified the enormity of this problem with almost 50% reporting waste sites eroding, or 'at risk'. Yet we do not have sufficient evidence to: 1) build robust business cases to manage (by defending, remediating or 'letting alone') these sites; 2) inform sustainable coastal management decision-making (Shoreline Management Plans) that takes account of the presence of waste; and 3) engage and support those communities who will live with these decisions. Working in 3 'at-risk' UK geographic areas we will: Investigate the risk of waste and pollution release under more severe flooding and coastal erosion scenarios. Assess the harm this pollution will do to coastal environments and adjacent communities. Increase collaboration between a range of stakeholders to understand the different kinds of environmental and social challenges involved. Facilitate inclusive debate on future efforts to manage these risks using established methods and arts-based activities to reach new audiences. Work with communities and policy makers to explore and co-develop policy options and practical actions that will build resilience, and identify potential co-benefits for people and place. Ensure the project's approach, methods and key findings for coastal resilience measures can be scaled across the UK. Assessing the range of risks associated with coastal waste release and building an inclusive and practical 'toolkit' of responses will benefit: 1) organisations who manage the coast, conserve and protect people and habitats; and 2) landowners and communities who use and appreciate the coastal environment for its amenities and cultural value. We have designed a novel 'Community Atlas' to share information, conclusions, and arts outputs with these groups, and that allows citizens to upload their own information and stories about coastal change. ResAnth has been co-conceived with our Project Partners through collaboration, in particular, with; 1) Environment Agency, local authorities, and coastal partnerships to identify research needs; 2) the Climate Change Committee and Policy Connect to understand policy gaps; and 3) engagement with communities through arts-science initiatives.