Spring 2021 Marine Autonomy Roundtable

The Spring 2021 Marine Autonomy Roundtable is being held for the first time this Spring to bring together research groups involved in fielding autonomous marine vehicles in both the underwater and surface domains. The common theme will be autonomy software, but the forum is also a means for introducing the wider community to the ongoing research agendas and core challenges of each participant's organization. A core goal is to identify opportunities for collaborations, including connections for internship and post-doc opportunities.

The format will be roughly 10 weeks of once-per-week group discussions with each participant presenting in one week. Invited participants come internationally from Industry, Academia and DoD laboratories. Each session will be on Zoom, on Thursday morning at 930 EST, for 45 minutes including presentation and discussion. The Autonomy Roundtable is coordinated with the Spring MIT class on Marine Autonomy (https://oceanai.mit.edu/2.680) and will include the roughly 25 students and MIT course TAs. Zoom invitations will be sent to all students and any individuals or students from the participant organizations. Content of presentations will be suitable for an open audience as if the forum were a public conference.

Framing the Discussion

The discussion content will likely vary widely between participants, and speakers have no restrictions. In some cases we were asked for to frame the discussion, so we came up with the below wish list of topics.

The Roundtable coincides with MIT 2.680. Our class is "Marine Autonomy, Sensing and Communications" and is focussed on these three areas, but more importantly perhaps, at the intersection of those areas. Any insights at this intersection would be wonderful.

1. What are the autonomous marine vehicle projects at your organization?

2. What are the mission goals the are they designed to address?

3. What is the typical mission duration? What is the limiting factor?

4. What is the nature of typical autonomy missions? How are they planned out prior to launch, and how may they adapt during the mission?

5. What are the primary sensors on your autonomous marine vehicles? Is the sensor information processed during the mission, or analyzed after the missions? Do vehicles share sensor information?

6a. What is the nature of vehicle to human communications in your typical mission? What does the operator strictly require? and what does the operator simply like to have?

6b. What is the nature of human to vehicle communications in your typical mission? Can the mission run entirely without human input? Does the system require that the human always have a comms link? If not, what is required? How is a loss of comms handled on the vehicle?

6c. What is the nature of vehicle-to-vehicle communications in your typical mission (if it is a multi-robot mission)?

7. Is your organization looking for new hires, or internships? If so, what are the qualities of a great intern in your organization?