IPB Students Invents Physical Measurement of Water with OTG Method
Indonesia is a maritime country rich of marine resources. However, in reality, Indonesia’s marine potency has not been explored optimally. Development in marine sector is lacking due to slow technology advancement. Technology innovations are always needed in various sectors, marine sector is not an exception. Three IPB students of Bogor Agricultural University (IPB) created an innovation in measuring physical parameter of body of water using OTG methods (auto tracking GPS) to answer technology demands in maritime sector.
Sefto, Yoan Andriansyah, and Naufal Hamdani Yuza from Department of Marine Science and Technology (ITK) IPB, through Students Creativity Program of research (PKM-PE), under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Ir. Indra Jaya, MSc, created this innovation as a way to explore Indonesian marine sector.
“We offer an innovation of a measurement of water parameter using autonomous system. The parameters that we measure are temperature and clarity. Actually, there are already equipment to measure both parameters, but the existing ones only measure in certain points,” Sefto stated.
Looking at the current technologies, these students offer an innovation that can cover the drawbacks of the existing equipment with boat tracking method. The method is done by deploying a boat equipped with temperature and clarity sensors that can autonomously move following the GPS coordinate that has been determined before.
“As long as the boat moves, both parameters will be measured. Unlike the existing mehods, which only measure at certain points of the water, we measure both parameters along the track that is passed by the boat. Temperature and clarity in this sense are only parameters. The main thing that we offer here is the autonomous method. Autonomous is a network that is free and have its own system management,” said Sefto.
The utilization system of the boat can be done by 2 methods, which are remote and autonomous methods. The difference is as follows: remote method needs a human touch to control the boat, and autonomous moves by its own system. The maximum distance of the boat is 100 meters.
The advantage of our technology innovation is that it can be used in body of water that is hard to reach by human, due to shallow topography, which can cause survey boats can’t travel there. There are also places that are inhabited by dangerous animals or toxic air.
“We hope that our technology can help fishermen, so that they can know areas with certain temperature and clarity that may contain many fishes. Besides, we hope that we can help marine institutions to create a map of clarity and temperature variations in Indonesian waters,” Sefto explained. (Ard)
