Tackling Climate Change with Autonomous Seaweed Farms Hitchhiking on Ocean Currents

Explore innovative approaches to carbon removal through autonomous seaweed farms in this thought-provoking talk. Discover how leveraging ocean currents and minimal solar-powered propulsion can create a scalable solution for capturing and sequestering CO2. Learn about the potential of seaweed to offset up to 10% of human emissions by rapidly converting dissolved CO2 into biomass and sinking it into the deep ocean. Delve into the research on developing control and learning methods for operating these farms efficiently, addressing challenges such as under-actuated agents in complex, time-varying ocean currents with imperfect forecasts. Gain insights into formulating this as an optimal control problem and understand the importance of "going with the flow" to navigate and optimize seaweed growth while minimizing energy consumption.