Smart Floats Network Will Form Ocean of Things

Smart Floats Network Will Form Ocean of Things

ocean of things

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Connected sensor networks would enhance maritime situational awareness. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has announced its “Ocean of Things” program, which will deploy thousands of small, low-cost floats that would form a distributed sensor network in order to enable persistent maritime situational awareness over large ocean areas.

To leading IoT 2017 Conference

Within the framework of this IoT program for the maritime sphere, each smart float, say DARPA officials, would contain a suite of commercially available sensors to collect environmental data — including statistics on ocean temperature, sea state, and location — as well as activity data about commercial vessels, aircraft, and even aquatic life moving through the area.

The sensor data would be periodically transmitted via satellite to a cloud network for storage and real-time analysis, according to mil-embedded.com.

“The goal of the program is to increase maritime awareness in a cost-effective way,” said John Waterston, program manager in DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office (STO). “It would be cost-prohibitive to use existing platforms to continuously monitor vast regions of the ocean. 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.”

DARPA claims that the Ocean of Things faces two major technical challenges: float development and data analytics. The agency has decided to open those two aspects of the project to proposers.

In the area of float development, DARPA is looking for an intelligent float to house a passive sensor suite that can survive in harsh maritime environments. Each float would report information from its surroundings for at least one year before safely scuttling itself in the deep ocean. Requirements for the floats: made of environmentally safe materials, pose no danger to vessels, and comply with all federal laws, regulations, and executive orders related to protection of marine life.

Regarding the data-analytics aspect – it will require proposers to develop cloud-based software and analytic techniques to process the data collected by the floats. These proposals will need to include a dynamic display of float locations, health, and mission performance; processing of environmental data for oceanographic and meteorological models; algorithms to automatically detect, track, and identify nearby vessels; and identification of new indicators of maritime activity.

The latest technological innovations in the IoT field in defense, security and law enforcement, smart city/safe city, industry, etc. will be the focus of the forthcoming IoT 2017 Conference and Exhibition organized by iHLS.

The event that will be held on December 25th, 2017 at the Lago Conference Center in Rishon LeZion will serve as a meeting point to all the leading members of the IoT ecosystem in Israel and abroad: experts, industries, startups and entrepreneurs, integrators, and officials from the defense and security, law enforcement and first responders sectors, and many more.  

For more details

Booth/sponsorship/lecture: Matan Shaked  +972-54-809-7456  [email protected]  [email protected]