St. Thomas · USVI · 18.34°N 64.93°W

The VICARlab

The first Robotics and AI lab in the U.S. Caribbean, dedicated to marine science research and conservation.

NEW Check out our blog and updates from the lab

This site is under active development. New content is being added regularly.

01 / About

A lab for fast-changing ecosystems.

Caribbean coral reefs are changing fast. To protect them, we need to see those changes in real time, in finer detail, and across more reefs than divers alone can survey.

The VICAR Lab is working to bring autonomous underwater robots, AI tools, and data systems into these surveys, so we can document what is happening, understand why, and act to preserve these vulnerable ecosystems.

Diver above a bleached Caribbean reef during the 2023/2024 mass bleaching event
A reef survey diver over a bleached mesophotic coral reef, 2023. Photo: TCRMP.

The VICAR Lab is the operational core of the Virgin Islands Center for Autonomous Research (VICAR) project, funded by a five-year, $7 million U.S. National Science Foundation EPSCoR E-RISE RII award (OIA-2446008). We are based at the Center for Marine and Environmental Studies (CMES), St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands. We use underwater robots, 3D mapping, and AI to study Caribbean reefs, and we build the software and survey methods that tie it all together.

Our starting point is the Territorial Coral Reef Monitoring Program (TCRMP): 34 permanent reef sites across the U.S. Virgin Islands, monitored continuously for 25 years, together holding roughly 1.6 million expert observations of reef life. Over that quarter-century, TCRMP has documented massive declines in coral abundance across these reefs, and the pace of change is accelerating. Long-term monitoring has to keep up with the ecosystems it is tasked to measure, and traditional diver-based surveys are increasingly strained to capture the full scale and scope of what is happening underwater.

This is where automation comes in. We use autonomous tools to augment human surveys, not replace them: extending the reach of expert divers, improving the resolution and consistency of the data, and developing and deploying these technologies at a scale they have not yet reached on coral reefs. The goal is a stronger monitoring program here in the territory, and a model that monitoring programs elsewhere can build on.

VICARIUS, VICAR's Integrated Undersea Survey platform, is the system that ties this work together: shared survey methods, shared code, and the data that flows between them. We built it to serve many research teams at CMES, and to stay useful long after any single project ends.

↗ Read the launch announcement

02 / Projects

Active projects and preliminary tests.

Ongoing research using VICAR's platforms and methods, plus early-stage work on hardware, behavior, and field shakedowns.

Fish Spawning Aggregations · AUV + video

Grouper spawning aggregation monitoring

Caribbean groupers form predictable spawning aggregations (FSAs) at specific sites each winter. These aggregations are critical for population persistence and uniquely vulnerable to fishing pressure when fish concentrate in space and time. The lab is using underwater videography and emerging AUV-based survey methods to document FSAs as a non-extractive monitoring tool, building visual records of aggregation behavior and abundance that complement acoustic and diver-based approaches used across the U.S. Virgin Islands.

AI Fish Tracking · Computer Vision

AI tracking of fish from video

A computer-vision pipeline that detects and tracks individual fish across frames of underwater video. The same model can support automated abundance counts, species identification, and behavioral analysis. Applied to AUV transects and FSA footage, it offers a path to scaling fish-survey effort and to detecting previously undocumented spawning aggregations from existing video collections.

3D Photogrammetry · TCRMP

3D photogrammetric models of TCRMP sites

Diver-collected high-resolution imagery is reconstructed into dense 3D models of TCRMP reef sites, providing a structural and biological substrate that can be revisited and re-measured year over year. AI-assisted annotation (TagLab) and 3D visual analytics (VisCore) support colony-level identification, size and health change detection, structural complexity metrics, and competitive-interaction analysis across shallow and mesophotic habitats.

GCBE4 Response · Colony tracking

Tracking colony-level bleaching responses

Annotated 3D models of TCRMP sites are used to follow individual coral colonies through the 4th Global Coral Bleaching Event (2023 to 2024), the largest bleaching episode recorded in the U.S. Virgin Islands. Each colony is segmented, identified to species, and tracked across repeated visits, producing colony-level time series of size, tissue condition, mortality, and competitive interactions. The same models measure structural complexity at biologically meaningful scales, linking individual fate to habitat depth, exposure, and surrounding community composition.

AUV · Georeferenced DEMs

AUV imagery to centimeter-scale 3D maps

AUV-collected downward-facing imagery is reconstructed into georeferenced digital elevation models with centimeter-scale accuracy. The resulting orthomosaics and bathymetry layers drop directly into standard GIS workflows, where they can be overlaid on existing TCRMP spatial datasets, used to plan more precise follow-up AUV missions, and serve as a reusable substrate for ecological analysis.

Preliminary tests

AUV Methods · Hydrus microAUV

Hydrus microAUV deployment test

Early field tests of the lab's newest acquisition, the Hydrus microAUV from Advanced Navigation. The vehicle is small enough to be hand-deployed from a small boat (deployment is genuinely a flick of the wrist), which dramatically lowers the logistical bar for AUV-based reef survey work in the Virgin Islands.

Behavior Tests · RangerBot

Obstacle avoidance

Early test footage of a RangerBot AUV detecting and steering around a diver during a shallow-water transect at Reef Bay. The vehicle uses stereo vision and inertial sensing to detect obstacles in real time, a prerequisite for safe close-range survey work on complex reef terrain.

Hardware · BlueROV2

DVL installation and ROV repairs

Summer 2025 interns Gidal Williams and Viana Biscoe installing a Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) on the lab's BlueROV2. DVL integration gives the vehicle bottom-relative velocity measurements, supporting precise station keeping and georeferenced navigation during inspection and survey missions.

03 / Tech

Our growing collection of intelligent machines and other tools.

Autonomous underwater vehicles for benthic and fish surveys (Hydrus, RangerBot), a diver-held Canon EOS R5 C cinema camera in an underwater housing for 3D photogrammetry, and the VICAR Compute Core (workstation plus archival NAS) for 3D reconstruction, AI model training, and version-controlled storage.

03 / VICARIUS

VICAR's Integrated Undersea Survey platform.

The harness for everything the lab does more than once.

VICARIUS, short for VICAR's Integrated Undersea Survey platform, ties our repeated workflows together: AUV mission planning and post-mission processing, 3D photogrammetric reconstruction, AI model training and inference, segmentation and annotation review, classifier evaluation, and the data conventions that keep all of it traceable.

Shared infrastructure means a method developed for one student's thesis can be reused by the next, a model trained on one dataset can be applied to another, and results can be reproduced from raw inputs months or years later.

Code & repositories

04 / Outreach

Showing up locally.

Community events, tabling, classroom visits, and public talks the lab has been part of.

05 / Team

The people behind the work.

TCRMP team conducting reef surveys
Divers ascending from surveys at Cane Bay Deep, Spring 2026. Photo: J. Quetel

Faculty · Students · Collaborators.

VICAR Lab + CoRRL
06 / Publications

Publications.

VICAR Lab publications are underway. In the meantime, publications by team members and collaborators are maintained at their respective websites.

Lauren K. Olinger, Ph.D.
laurenolinger.org · publication PDFs
Tyler Smith, Ph.D. · CoRRL
corrl.org · publications
07 / Blog

Latest posts.

Short transmissions from the lab: deployments, methods, results, and student work. Click a post to read it in full.

08 / Contact

Get in touch.

Interested in this work?

We are recruiting master's students through the MMES program at CMES who want to work at the intersection of marine science, robotics, and machine learning.

Reach out to Lauren →
Lauren K. Olinger, Ph.D.
VICAR Lab Director
lauren.olinger@uvi.edu
More on VICAR and collaborators
tr.ee/vicar
Follow the lab on Bluesky
@the-vicar.bsky.social
Sunset over St. Thomas, USVI