Open Source Oceans

Oceanography's dependence on expensive, proprietary robots and sensors to measure the ocean and the bespoke manufacturers who sell and support them is a barrier to being able to lower the cost of collecting data and being able to scale it up.  The following examples have happened in Oceanography:

  1. Company failures: Companies have gone out of business, ceasing the ability to support or refurbish their products, leaving customers with proprietary products with no chance for support. [1] 
  2. Forced obsolescence: For various reasons companies will cease support of older products, leaving customers with proprietary products with no chance for support [2].  In some cases these might be viable business decisions, but they can damage the long term investment the Oceanographic community made in their products [3].
  3. Aquisition and mergers: Most cutting edge robots and sensors come from smaller companies who are often purchased by larger companies.  This can create confusion of who supports what after a purchase or merger and even as simple as complete serial number confusion.  [4]
  4. Proprietary Data Formats: In addition to proprietary hardware and software companies will use proprietary data formats further locking people into buying, upgrading and supporting their proprietary software to unlock the data formats. [5]. These formats can restrict API's making it unnecessarily difficult for the Oceanographic community to create better software.[6][7]
  5. Cost and Complexity: There is no low cost CTD option, so the open source community made one.  [8]

In all these examples, science suffers.  Open Source Oceans is a Public Benefit Corporation dedicated to helping to design, build and support an open source version of every robot and sensor that the Oceanographic Community.  We have already started on an open source glider called SeaFlight.   

Who:

John Reine: Electrical Engineer who raised internal money at WHOI for designing and building the SeaFlight Glider.  

Jeremy Paulus: Mechanical Engineer who designed the SeaFlight gliders buoyancy engine and chassis

What:

Open Source Oceans will design and build a family of Robots and Sensors for the Oceanographic communities around the world.  

Robots:
  1. Underwater glider 
  2. Autonomous solar/electric boat (to recover + deploy ocean glider)
  3. Long Range AUV
  4. Autonomous solar/electric sailboat
Sensors:
  1. CTD
  2. pCO2

Building Blocks:

  1. Proper clock
  2. Watchdog recovery board via satellite
  3. Data Logger 

 

Where:

The PBC will be located in Falmouth, MA, where the original Slocum Glider was created by working with WHOI scientists and Engineers, and we will work with Scientists, Engineers, Technicians and students at WHOI and around the world to design, build and test this family of sea going robots.  

When:

Now!  September of 2025 is when we are officially bringing our focus back to this project.  The plan goes as follows:

How can I get involved?

  1. Sign up for our mailing list

 

 

 

Over the last decade of global warming, marine heatwaves have doubled in frequency and increases in tropical cyclone winds and rainfall have amplified freshwater runoff flooding into coastal ecosystems laden with sediment and contaminants. Almost 11% of the global population – 896 million people – live within the coastal zone and face escalating climate compounded risks, including sea level rise and degradation of coastal ecosystems [1]. Response to such extreme change requires broader ocean observing networks, including broader collection of basic vertical profiles of physical, chemical, and biological ocean properties. Yet, globally, the current capacity to collect ocean profiles remains far too low.

Emerging global networks of autonomous profiling robots are concentrated in the United States and western Europe (1st world nations) and cover only a small fraction of global coastal ecosystems [2]. Expanding coastal networks to support global monitoring, forecasting, and mitigation of future extreme events requires profiling robots that are lower cost, simpler to fabricate, and easier to operate and maintain. The open-source revolution that transformed software development in the previous decade is already accelerating development of robust, locally manufactured, repairable, and less-costly vehicles and sensors.

The 

 

Footnotes:

  1. Hobi Labs goes out of business 
  2. AML Oceanographic ends general support including service, technical support, calibration, and repair of legacy fixed-sensor instrumentation 
  3. In early 2015 Liquid Robotics announced end of sale of the Wave Glider SV2, first introduced in 2008.
  4. SBE, Satlantic, WET Labs and Sea-Bird Scientific: how to match sensors to the correct manufacturer
  5. Disrupting data sharing for a healthier ocean
  6. Teledyne RDI's proprietary WVS format and the open source workaround
  7. ADCP VMDAS proprietary format and the open source workaround: UHDAS
  8. Cost and complexity of a CTD impedes the progress of researchers

 

 

[1] IPCC 6th Assessment Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate, 2019.

[2] BOON: A BOUNDARY OCEAN OBSERVING NETWORK