Smart Oceans - Internet of Things
Wednesday Series: Innovation Addressing Pressing Global Needs - Saving Our Oceans DARPA's Smart Oceans Initiative The US Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, DAPRA currently has a program underway to deploy an ocean based, "Internet of Things" on the open oceans. DARPA's Ocean of Things consists of thousands of small, low cost, floats with sensors for real time monitoring of maritime activity. Most parts of the open ocean are essentially unmonitored and on radio silence which is amazing because oceans comprise 71% of the earth's surface. Open Sea Communications The goal is to form a distributed sensor network. The small floats will have a suite of commercially available sensors to collect environmental data such as ocean temperature, sea conditions, locations as well as commercial vessels, aircraft and marine mammals moving in the monitored areas. Satellite Transmissions to the Cloud The floats would send the data via