Amphibious Data: Sensing and Robotics Where Land Meets Water
Collecting data from the dynamic interface between land and water — such as surf zones, shallow coastal waters, river estuaries, and soft coastlines — remains an underdeveloped frontier in environmental monitoring. These areas pose unique challenges: they are too shallow and turbulent for traditional underwater vehicles and too soft, wet, or unstable for standard land robots. As a result, critical information about flow dynamics, sediment transport, and ecosystem health often goes unmeasured. Tackling these gaps requires rugged, adaptable technologies that can sense and move reliably across muddy, sandy, and submerged terrains. In this talk, I will share our recent work developing specialized flow sensors for shallow water environments and amphibious robotic platforms capable of traversing soft and saturated ground. Together, these tools promise to open up new possibilities for high-resolution data acquisition where it is needed most: at the ever-shifting edge between land and water.