Abstracte capabilities of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and their ability to perform tasks both autonomously and adaptively are rapidly improving, and the desire to quickly and efficiently sample the ocean environment as Earth's climate changes and natural disasters occur has increased significantly in the last decade. As such, this thesis proposes to develop a method for single and multiple AUVs to collaborate autonomously underwater while autonomously adapting their motion to changes in their local environments, allowing them to sample and track various features of interest with greater efficiency and synopticity than previously possible with preplanned AUV or ship-based surveys. is concept is demonstrated to work in field testing on multiple occasions: with a single AUV autonomously and adaptively tracking the depth range of a thermocline or acousticline, and with two AUVs coordinating their motion to collect a data set in which internal waves could be detected. is research is then taken to the next level by exploring the problem of adaptively and autonomously tracking spatiotemporally dynamic underwater fronts and plumes using individual and autonomously collaborating AUVs. Stephanie entered the Massachusetts Institute of Technology/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution Joint Graduate Program following college to study Oceanographic Engineering. Her Doctoral research, which comprises this thesis, has focused on using autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) to perform autonomous and environmentally adaptive sampling of the ocean environment, focusing on underwater feature detection and tracking for more efficient and synoptic data collection with AUVs. Stephanie has enjoyed being on and near the ocean, working with oceanographic vehicles and instrumentation, and seeing her complex underwater vehicle missions work out in the water, and she has had the great opportunity of participating in over a dozen research cruises since she first started working with underwater vehicles in college. roughout graduate school, Stephanie has continued her many hobbies and activities, adding hiking, farming, sailing, and woodworking to the list. I would also like to thank all the members of the LAMSS lab past and present: ank you Toby for fixing nearly any software problem we threw at you on cruise and in the office, and for completing our A-team for every cruise we were on together. ank you also for being my partner in crime on cruise, on travel, and in life. I could not have completed this research nearly as efficiently without you there to devise all sorts of work-arounds when I wanted extra features to make my virtual experiments easier to run. ank you to Erin and Sheida for being both great friends and lab mates and for teaching me that it is okay to not be the only woman in an engineering lab! anks Stephanie for always being excited about my research and hosting craft nights. om, thanks for being such a quick learner on cruise and generally a fun person to hang out with.
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