Bristlemouth: a full-stack marine connectivity standard
Abstract
Oceans cover most of the planet, drive our weather and climate, and carry 90% of the worlds goods. Yet, historically, ocean data has been exceedingly sparse, which limits situational awareness, introduces aliasing effects in the interpretation of measurements, and greatly reduces our ability to forecast and predict ocean processes, surface weather, and climate dynamics. Despite great advances in satellite technology, sensors, and autonomous vehicles, this ocean data gap persists and is rapidly growing.One of the biggest hurdles in making ocean sensing more scalable and accelerating sensor innovation, is the lack of connectivity standardization. In the marine space, almost every platform, sensor, and component, has a unique connector, pin configuration, and communication protocol.This means that sensor integration is slow, expensive, and often fragile. As a result, the ocean data gap remains and is rapidly growing. In this proposal we describe a connectivity standard that will enablenew levels of growth and scale in marine technology and applications, while empowering an ecosystem of innovation and cross-organizational collaboration. Scaling ocean sensing is essentialto providing relevant data densities capable of resolving relevant processes (not under-sampling), and provide meaningful constraints on ocean, atmospheric, and climate models. Initially intended for internal use, Sofar Ocean developed a full-stack marine standard to make integration with sensors and other modular components faster and easier, while reducing the need for custom engineering. We called it Bristlemouth, after the most abundant fish in our oceans, and to reflect the goal: ocean data abundance. Bristlemouth powers the scaling of Sofars global sensor network and enables us to integrate faster with new components and third-party sensor packages. However, our mission is to drive the proliferation of ocean sensing, and we believe the best way to achieve that is to open upthe Bristlemouth standard to the community at large, to enable accelerated innovation in the marine space. This proposal describes the plan to develop, test, release, document, and support the Bristlemouth connectivity standard to support accelerated growth of the blue economy, drive new insights to science and research, and contribute to enhanced monitoring and mitigation capabilities for ocean conservation. We propose a partnership approach to ensure we successfully develop the Bristlemouth technology, open it up to the community, and make it accessible across a broad spectrum of applications, especially in research, educational, innovation (e.g. startups), industry, and research settings. Previous attempts at standardization have shown that it is important to provide a full-stack connectivity capability and ensure rapid and broad adoption across the research community to ensure commercial support from vendors and manufacturers of components and systems. We will accelerate this process by designing the standard to be open, simple, and accessible to enable anyone to integrate the Bristlemouth standard in their applications.**Approved for Public Release**
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 05, 2021
- Source ID
- N000142112556
Entities
People
- T. T. Janssen
Organizations
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy