About Us
Erin Fischell, PhD
President and Principal Scientist
Dr. Erin M. Fischell is a scientist and engineer with more than 15 years of marine robotics, sensing and acoustic experience with research interests in acoustics, signal processing, sensors, underwater vehicles, and robot perception. She received her B.S. from Cornell University in 2010, PhD in Mechanical and Oceanographic Engineering from MIT/WHOI in 2015, then worked as a Battelle Fellow postdoctoral researcher at MIT from 2015-2019. Dr. Fischell became an assistant scientist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) in 2017, where she served as principal investigator on a diverse array of programs funded by ONR, DARPA, ARPA-E, and NOAA while teaching acoustics courses in the MIT/WHOI joint program. In 2019 she received the Moore Inventor Fellow award for work in underwater navigation, underwater swarming and distributed sensing. In 2021, Dr. Fischell left academia to start Acbotics Research, with a hit list of problems that have been irking her for more than a decade. She now splits her time between product development and consulting on acoustics/marine robotics topics.
Sam Fladung
Chief Engineer
An electrical engineer with more than 15 years underwater robotics and sensing expertise, Mr. Fladung brings industry experience to the Acbotics team, including EMC/EMI, automated test fixturing, design for manufacture, and production development work. His previous industry job was with Greensea Systems, where he was part of the development team for a ROV crawler and hull grooming system, with responsibilities including development of sonar image mosaicing, object detection, collision avoidance, path planning, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) and navigation software. Prior to that he worked at Teledyne Marine Systems where he performed high level systems design on multiple projects including Slocum Glider and buoyancy driven drifting systems and major subassemblies, designed PCBs, and firmware for new generation of underwater vehicles. He was also responsible for all electrical and software portions of a multi-kilowatt low frequency underwater sound source, including signal processing, gui development, data acquisition and servo motor control. Other prior experience includes working for Cornell Lab of Ornithology managing electrical development for whale detection buoys.
James Truman
Principal Mechanical Engineer
James has been developing and manufacturing underwater systems for more than twenty years. He received his Sc.B. in Mechanical Engineering from Brown University in 2002 and a Masters of Engineering - Robotics and Controls from Johns Hopkins University in 2007. James led hardware development of xBot-3 at Phoenix International, the G2 and G3 Slocum Gliders at Teledyne Webb Research, and hull-cleaning robots at Greensea.
He splits his time between Acbotics Research and his own consulting company.
About Us
Products
Custom Solutions
Consulting
Acoustics and Marine Robotics are at the core of our business: and we strive to develop products to make our own lives easier.
Consulting
Custom Solutions
Consulting
Consulting services including array design, subject matter expertise in autonomy/acoustics/perception, and data fusion.
Custom Solutions
Custom Solutions
Custom Solutions
Need software or hardware in the area of Marine Robotics and Acoustics? Contact us to see if we can help!