Virginia, January 30: To increase maritime awareness in a cost-effective way, The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is seeking proposals for “intelligent floats” with an ambitious goal: wire the world’s oceans with a network of sensors, capable of recording vast amounts of data about the environment that takes up 71 percent of our planet.
The plan has been compared to the “internet of things” trend. Yet instead of linking refrigerators and thermostats to the internet, the “Ocean of Things” will bring everything from whale calls to water temperature online.
“By coupling powerful analytical tools with commercial sensor technology, we plan to create floating sensor networks that significantly expand maritime awareness at a fraction of the cost of current approaches,” says said John Waterston, program manager in DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office (STO).
A web of data-hungry floats could help change that. DARPA’s agency announcement on the proposed network suggests that the intelligent floats should be flexible to accommodate different payloads and sensors, depending on their unique mission. Everyone should collect basic environmental data like temperature, salinity, and sea state, as well as report their system health and detect nearby vessels.
Many marine scientists are excited about the wave of data that an Ocean of Things could provide. The sheer size of the ocean, and the difficulties that come with operating in it, often means researchers can either choose to have spatial data — the same sort of information, taken at different points and different times — or temporal data, the same information taken at one point over a long period of time. The Ocean of Things could provide an as-yet-unheard-of method of recording both.