Erin M. Fischell

Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, IIT@MIT

Papers

Total Citations

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About

Erin M. Fischell is a leading researcher in autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) systems, specializing in low-cost swarm navigation and control. Her work addresses the fundamental challenges of underwater robotics—where GPS is unavailable and acoustic communication is severely limited—by developing innovative solutions for multi-vehicle coordination without expensive sensors. Fischell’s most influential papers, each with 36 citations, tackle these constraints head-on: "Relative Autonomy and Navigation for Command and Control of Low-Cost Autonomous Underwater Vehicles" (2019) introduces methods for enabling small, affordable AUVs to navigate and cooperate despite lacking Doppler velocity logs, while "Single-Hydrophone Low-Cost Underwater Vehicle Swarming" (2019) demonstrates how swarms of underwater robots can coordinate using just a single hydrophone—a breakthrough that brings aerial and ground drone swarm capabilities to the challenging underwater domain. Her earlier work, "An Overview of MIT-Olin’s Approach in the AUVSI RobotX Competition" (2016), showcases her team’s practical success in competitive autonomous systems. Fischell’s contributions are critical for expanding the operational reach of underwater robotics, enabling applications in environmental monitoring, search-and-rescue, and defense with dramatically reduced costs.