THE SITUATION

With over seventy percent of the earth’s surface covered by oceans and impossible to protect with large manned military vessels, the US Navy is looking for smaller, less expensive Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IASs) to fill this threat detection gap. The concept involves fleets of unmanned surface vessels like Ocean Aero’s wind and solar powered TRITON platform integrated with onboard AI detection and mission automation software able to autonomously search the oceans for possible maritime threats, (i.e. manned and unmanned military vessels), then provide details on detected targets, (i.e. pictures, speeds, directions), to remote operations centers for coordinated information planning and response efforts.

THE CHALLENGE

Automating marine robotic operations requires building GPU edge-compute hardware, setting up embedded operating systems, and integrating many technologies like cameras, sonar, lasers, inertial navigation systems, pan & tilt actuators, vehicle control systems, lowbandwidth communications, and more. Once that work is completed companies must then develop middleware for deploying and managing artificial intelligence models and automation scripts. All of this must happen before companies even start developing their specific robotic automation solutions, which significantly delays full product solution testing and delivery to end customers.