Remote sensing

Ocean Remote Sensing Program Reaches New Stage

The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has been advancing its Ocean of Things (OoT) program. The program seeks to enable persistent maritime situational awareness over large ocean areas by deploying thousands of small, low-cost floats that could form a distributed sensor network.

Each smart float would contain a suite of commercially available sensors to collect environmental data – such as ocean temperature, sea state, and location – as well as activity data about commercial vessels, aircraft, and even maritime mammals moving through the area. The floats would transmit data periodically via satellite to a cloud network for storage and real-time analysis, according to darpa.mil.

While several programs over the past decade have measured the ocean environment on a large scale (>10 km), the Ocean of Things(OoT) program will provide measurements that are orders of magnitude finer (<10m).  

DARPA’s Strategic Technology Office has recently granted Numurus, a company specializing in smart IoT solutions, a $2.3M contract to integrate its Smart IoT Ecosystem into thousands of satellites connected remote monitoring devices.   

The technology will provide smart information ecosystems for the increasing number of robotic inspection solutions and smart device fleets.