Description
The project concerns the development and demonstration at sea of a networked vehicle system for persistent communications and data collection in remote oceanic areas. The system is composed of a long endurance autonomous surface vehicle (ASV), long endurance autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), long range unmanned air vehicles (UAV), helikites, and control stations. The ASV is both a communications hotspot and a docking base (for AUVs), operating 24/7 in remote ocean areas. The ASV supports smart routing protocols for direct communications, via persistent UAV relays, or delayed data transfer to control stations. The control stations provide advanced planning and execution control capabilities, as well as dissemination of data. The system supports inter-operability protocols to allow expansion to vehicles from third parties. The project is organized into 6 work-packages: 1: Project management and systems engineering; 2: Communications and inter-operability; 3: Unmanned vehicle systems; 4: Land/ship control stations; 5: System integration and testing; and, 6: Demonstration at sea. The project builds on technological, scientific and operational experience of a consortium of FEUP (leader), IPMA, and Portuguese Navy from Portugal, and AMOS from Norway.
Summary of project results
There is now an urgent need for a sustained, persistent and accessible presence in the oceans that helps to understand and monitor key issues, particularly as to how climate change, ocean acidification, unsustainable fishing, pollution, waste, loss of habitats and biodiversity, maritime transport, security and mining affect the sustainability and global management of the ocean. This project responds to some of these challenges, notably those that respect underwater and radio communications in remote ocean areas, and it does so in a systematic way and in the framework of research already developed jointly by the partners. The project concerns the development and demonstration at sea of the Networked Ocean System, a networked vehicle system for persistent communications and data collection in remote oceanic areas. The system is composed of a long endurance autonomous surface vehicle (ASV), long endurance autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV), communication gateways, long range unmanned air vehicles (UAV), helikites, and control stations. The overall Networked Ocean System is scalable. The system addresses all the topics of the call for this type of projects by providing unique and cost effective capabilities for covering wide areas in the Atlantic, being available for long periods of time, providing timely, secure and reliable communications, collecting data from smart platforms or land-based stations, and disseminating data to land-based stations or smart platforms. The Networked Ocean vehicles will run the IMC-Dune-TREX software. The control stations will run the Neptus command and control software with a TREX plug-in. The Networked Ocean System will use the IMC communications protocol. All nodes in the system talk IMC. This allows for inter-operability. NOS has support for inter-operability with other vehicle systems compliant with JAUS protocol. The underwater communications component is supported by the Janus protocol. All systems have support for disruptive tolerant networking (DTN). The NOS vehicles will have TREX-based deliberative planning capabilities for unattended operations in remote areas and smart cooperation
Summary of bilateral results