The evolution of smart software within Maritime Robotics
This presentation looks at the rapid evolution of maritime robotics during the last ten years, which has seen vehicles transition from being manually operated data collection devices to sophisticated assets capable of carrying out persistent, collaborative autonomy missions. This has resulted in a general shift in technology towards software focused solutions to meet new market requirements and expectations. Key development areas include a progressive move towards modular open architecture autonomy systems, the use of new generation machine learning algorithms to enable the conversion of raw sensor data into actionable information, and the use of intuitive Command and Control systems to enable the effective interaction between operators and unmanned systems. The first section of this talk will present SeeByte, a commercial company specialising in the delivery of maritime robotics software solutions, and some of the key applications that they have delivered to meet the needs of this evolving market. The second section of the presentation will provide some insight into SeeByte’s view on future market trends and research requirements. These include a shift towards autonomous intervention tasks, improved methods for data storage and processing, adoption of next generation deep learning and transfer learning for data analysis and scene understanding and an increased uptake in Augmented Reality and Natural Language approaches for improved HMI.