Ocean of Things - Broad Agency Announcement

An additional set of Q&A for the Oceans of Things BAA has been posted to the DARPA website and can be found at the following link:

http://www.darpa.mil/attachments/OceanofThingsQA%202_05FEB18_for%20posting.pdf

The Q&A for the Oceans of Things BAA has been posted to the DARPA website and can be found at the following link:

http://www.darpa.mil/attachments/OceanofThingsQA_01232018posting.pdf

The complexity of the ocean environment and operations therein has previously encouraged the use of exquisite systems to understand maritime dynamics and activity. The Ocean of Things program is an opportunity to provide affordable ocean sensing at large scales and high resolution. Improved maritime analysis provides detailed understanding of the ocean environment, informs regulatory commitments to protect natural resources, and enables the military to operate more effectively on the high seas.

Ocean of Things provides environmental sensing and operational surveillance missions by composing a distribution of heterogeneous floats. Each float characterizes the physical environment through periodic sampling of local ocean properties, while also reporting significant maritime events. A primary technical objective of the program is to develop edge-processing methods to identify and report the essential information from these "interesting" events within a float's communication and energy constraints. Ocean of Things will also investigate the selection of sensors and sampling rates to maximize system performance. Additional hardware design efforts will seek to improve float persistence (i.e., motion control, biofouling reduction, and power control).

The stored reports must contain sufficient information for application of advanced processing techniques (e.g., filtering, clustering, and machine learning). Performers must utilize techniques to process this sparse data to develop vessel tracks, characterize vessel behaviors, and identify new signatures and signal associations in the collected data. Finally, Ocean of Things will research methods to visualize coverage, predict performance, and control individual floats to deliver resultant capabilities as a field comprised of thousands of floats.

See the attached Broad Agency Announcement for additional details and instructions.