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

探索和监测海洋、湖泊和海港等水生环境的能力对科学进步和社会需求至关重要。应用实例包括环境监测、地球物理调查、海洋资源管理等。下一个技术突破是使用一队水上机器人作为移动的水下声学网络，在水生环境中航行时自主收集和传输信息。虽然近年来相关领域取得了许多新的进展，但急需的水下网络技术仍然没有实现。研究界需要一个大规模的水下网络社区测试基础设施，可以支持广泛的研究，以实现这一未来。该项目旨在确定社区希望在这样一个试验平台中探索的基础研究挑战，并让社区定义和指定最有利于这种广泛实验的基础设施类型。为此，该项目旨在组织两次研讨会，让科学、联邦和商业部门的人员参与，以制定基础设施蓝图，推进水下移动的通信和联网领域。该项目通过汇集资源和促进多个技术领域的研究愿景的发展，包括水下通信和网络，海洋机器人和海洋监测，推动科学的进步。它孵化创新，以应对多种社会挑战，例如，海洋灾害应对或水道水质监测。这些讲习班旨在通过吸引K-12教育工作者，例如科学教师和水族馆馆长，扩大影响。该项目的主要贡献是一个研究讲习班和一个基础设施讲习班。研究研讨会吸引了来自国内外多个部门的科学家和从业人员，包括：1）来自学术界不同技术领域的学者，他们对海洋/水下生态系统感兴趣或感兴趣; 2）来自各个联邦资助机构的科学工作人员; 3）来自海军研究中心的科学家; 4）来自海底工业的科学家和从业人员。研究讲习班的目标是确定需要大规模测试基础设施服务的新趋势、迫切需要、潜在用户和创新技术。基础设施研讨会的目标是制定基础设施蓝图，并组建一支有能力的研究团队，以开发、部署和维护社区基础设施。通过这两个讲习班，该项目促进了来自不同部门的讲习班参与者之间的合作。设想的基础设施是一个开源的移动的水下声学网络测试平台，为声学通信、水下网络和系统、海洋机器人和数据科学社区提供方便的访问和共享使用。它力求降低研究界利用水下移动的通信的门槛，从而促进跨学科研究。

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.