SeaClear2.0 Winter School

Description

Organized by: Lehrstuhl für Informationstechnische Regelung
TUM School of Computation, Information and Technology
Technische Universität München

Speakers:
Stefan Sosnowski
N. Hoischen
T.-Y. Huang
N. Aoki
Lucian Busoniu
Marija Popovich
Kaya ter Burg
Scarlett Raine
Gerard Ciurana
Nikolas Dahn
Ivana Palunko
Domagoj Tolić
Daniel-Andre Dücker

The winter school aims to bring together researchers and practitioners from maritime robotics, control, perception, and environmental engineering to tackle marine debris remediation as a real-world autonomy problem. Building on the latest SeaClear2.0 latest advancements, the program focuses on the unsolved technical constraints that dominate marine deployments: vision in degraded conditions (low light, turbidity, domain shift), grasping and manipulation of unstructured debris, robust planning and control under uncertainty, and hard hardware limits in communication, compute, and energy.

We will highlight key challenges, current developments, and results from real-world trials focused on identifying and collecting litter from the seabed under varying environmental conditions.

The format combines lectures and tutorials with short participant introductions (2-minute pitches) to encourage cross-disciplinary exchange. The goal is to connect real field needs (site conditions, operational constraints) with robotics task formulations that can hold up in real deployments, and to highlight research questions that matter in practice.

Additional Description

Environmental Engineering
- Marine debris: a large-scale problem with much of it out of sight (e.g., seabed) and hard to address with manual operations alone
- Scalable prevention & remediation: how autonomous systems can complement (and reduce reliance on) human-intensive monitoring and cleanup
- Make data usable: practical monitoring/assessment for simple metrics, site prioritization, and impact reporting after interventions

Maritime Robotics and Control
- Underwater robotic systems end-to-end: from hardware design to software + onboard autonomy
- Planning and control under environmental uncertainty and inter-vehicle coupling
- Manipulation under uncertainty: compliant interaction, grasp selection, perception-driven retrieval
- Autonomy under constraints: limited communication / compute / energy budgets
- Perception in degraded conditions: robust ML for low light/turbidity, domain shift across sites, scarce datasets
- Multi-robot operations: coordinating UUV/USV/ROV teams for monitoring and intervention
Real-world deployment challenges: lessons learned from field deployment (what fails, what works), and the research-to-deployment gap

Period	9 Feb 2026 → 13 Feb 2026
Event type	Other
Location	Garching bei München, Germany, BavariaShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International