CI-P:Collaborative Research: Open-Source Mobile Underwater Acoustic Network Infrastructure

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The capability to explore and monitor our aquatic environments, such as the ocean, lakes, and seaports, is vital to science advancements and societal needs. Examples of applications include environmental monitoring, geophysical surveys, ocean resource management, and more. The next technological breakthrough is to use a fleet of aquatic robots as a mobile underwater acoustic network that autonomously collect and transmit information while navigating in the aquatic environment. Although recent years have seen many new advancements in related fields, the much-needed underwater network technologies still have not materialized. There is a need within the research community for an at-scale community testing infrastructure for underwater networks that can support a wide array of research to enable this future. This project seeks to identify the fundamental research challenges that the community would like to explore in such a testbed, and also have the community define and specify the type of infrastructure that will be most conducive for such wide-ranging experimentation. To this end, the project aims to organize two workshops to engage personnel from the scientific, federal, and commercial sectors in order to develop an infrastructure blueprint to advance the field of underwater mobile communications and networking. The project advances the progress of science by bringing together resources and facilitating development of a research vision for multiple technical fields, including underwater communications and networking, marine robotics, and ocean monitoring. It incubates innovation to address multiple societal challenges, for example, disaster response in the ocean or water quality monitoring in waterways. The workshops aim to broaden the impact by engaging K-12 educators, for example science teachers and aquarium curators. The main contributions of the project are a research workshop and an infrastructure workshop. The research workshop engages scientists and practitioners from multiple sectors, domestic and international, including: 1) scholars from diverse technical fields in academia with interest or stake in the ocean/underwater ecosystems; 2) scientific staff from various federal funding agencies; 3) scientists from naval research centers; 4) scientists and practitioners from sub-sea industries. The goal of the research workshop is to identify emerging trends, urgent needs, potential users and innovative technologies that will require the services of a large-scale test infrastructure. The goals of the infrastructure workshop are to generate an infrastructure blueprint and to form an able research team to develop, deploy and maintain the community infrastructure. Through these two workshops, the project fosters collaboration among workshop participants from diverse sectors. The envisioned infrastructure is an open-source mobile underwater acoustic network testbed that provides easy access and shared use by the communities of acoustic communications, underwater networking and systems, marine robotics, and data sciences. It seeks to lower the threshold for the research community to utilize underwater mobile communications and, thus, fosters interdisciplinary research.