Transforming Seagoing Science with Robotic Platforms, Innovative Software Engineering, and Data Analytics
On August 25th and 26th, 2015 Schmidt Ocean Institute convened an international group of 27 collaborating experts including young researchers and those with decades of experience in ocean sciences, marine operations, and technology research and development from Australia, Canada, Germany, Japan, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, and the United States.
The objectives of this workshop was to help Schmidt Ocean Institute keep its program development guidelines, priority research and technology development areas, and performance metrics well informed with the input from the global community of ocean researchers and technology development experts. We explored emerging trends and opportunities for advancing innovation in ocean sciences, related disciplines, and technologies through intelligent application, research, and development of innovative software engineering and computational algorithms, data acquisition, analysis, and interpretation methodologies, as well as robotic platforms.
The outcomes of this workshop will help identify critical directions and opportunities for accelerating ocean science with innovative technology research and development in preparation to SOI’s 2016 field season, 2017 proposal reviews, and call for proposals in collaborative oceanographic research on R/V Falkor in 2018.
The workshop agenda and presentations, are available by clicking on the icons to the left.
Workshop report with the summary of recommendations is available in PDF format at this URL.
The report provides an overview of presentations and discussions that took place at the planning workshop and highlights the key planning recommendations from the representatives of the international ocean research and technology development community to Schmidt Ocean Institute that were formulated during the meeting, as follows.
Recommendations enduring from the 2014 SOI planning workshop:
- Support the development of new sensors, vehicles, research platforms, data analysis tools, and other related oceanographic technologies to help increase the spatiotemporal resolution of ocean characterization.
- Make SOI research ship, robotic vehicles, and other research facilities available to support oceanographic technology research and development.
New recommendations:
- Publish the schedule of repositioning transits for R/V Falkor to provide ocean technology R&D teams with advance knowledge of available opportunities for shipboard technology trials at sea.
- Update the proposal solicitation process to encourage technology research and development that offer transformative solutions to important scientific questions.
- Continuously refine the ship and vehicle sensor suites to improve the collection of underway data for increased situational awareness during research cruises.
- Support the development of integrated data annotation system and software for the ship and vehicle sensors to manage standard oceanographic data processing workflows, local and remote data queries, data analysis for autonomous and intelligent decision support, data visualization, as well as education, engagement, and outreach applications.
- Support an oceanographic technology R&D facility to complement SOI’s ocean-going research program. Such a facility could focus on developing advanced technologies to support research projects on R/V Falkor, including deep sea and multi-agent robotic systems, automatic vehicle recovery capabilities, intelligent control software, inter-vehicle communications, in-situ data analysis algorithms, etc.
- Encourage standardization of instrument interfaces, survey workflows, data formats, communication protocols, and information processing tools. By adhering to standardized practices, interfaces, and formats, SOI could promote broader technology and data interoperability, and would be well positioned to benefit from standards-compliant technologies developed by others.
