Uncrewed Systems Technology 047 l Aergility ATLIS l AI focus l Clevon 1 UGV l Geospatial insight l Intergeo 2022 report l AUSA 2022 report I Infinity fuel cell l BeeX A.IKANBILIS l Propellers focus I Phoenix Wings Orca

21 architecture: how do we build a bucket of Legos without predefining what they are supposed to create?” Kinnaman founded Greensea in 2006, and recalls that building a business around the concept of an open architecture platform before the industry was willing to adopt one was difficult. “Open architecture is now quite a buzzword; everyone says it with their breakfast in the morning, but 16 years ago, nobody was talking about open architectures.” Building blocks In explaining the platform’s openness, he returns to the Lego analogy. “Lego is a little building block with a standard interface, and if you have an interface that matches that block, you can plug other blocks into it,” he says. “OpenSea is made up of hundreds of little ‘blocks’ with a public interface that people can build upon.” Greensea provides application programming interfaces (APIs) and interface control documents (ICDs) to enable customers and partners to develop software that works with OpenSea, and generally shares its knowledge of how to build robust underwater robotic systems. In the software stack on a vehicle’s main computer, OpenSea usually sits directly on top of the operating system. In most systems on which it is deployed, that OS is a Linux distribution, a choice that emerged from user preference, as many operators and manufacturers like it and its technical performance. “These days, with edge processors running OpenSea in autonomous robots or sensor sets, most of the OS backbone originates out of an Ubuntu Linux distribution. However, OpenSea is completely cross-platform. We have built packages for OpenSea that support systems from Windows to Red Hat and everything in between.” Greensea supports current and legacy systems, running a continuous process in-house in which the software engineering team is constantly porting OpenSea onto new platforms and testing it. “Every night we are testing and validating OpenSea across six or seven different platforms,” Kinnaman says. OpenSea provides common wrappers around OS processes. The wrappers serve as an abstraction layer between the OS and the particular implementation of OpenSea so that common calls and loggers can run over any platform. Pragmatism and architecture On top of that layer sits the OpenSea Library, an application suite that Kinnaman describes as a mixture of pragmatism and intentional architecture. “From a pragmatic perspective, the applications represent our 16 years of writing software for ocean robotics, and include everything from device drivers to utility functions to translation applications to the tools and processes that developers and users need.” On the architecture side, OpenSea addresses some critical technology, particularly control, navigation and autonomy, through what Kinnaman calls its big five applications. The first of these is OpenINS, an inertial navigation system engine, which processes and fuses sensor data to produce a cohesive state estimate (navigation solution) for a robot platform. The second is OpenCMD, which is a vehicle platform and control package that provides full, six-degrees-of-freedom, multi-state, open- and closed-loop control for a vehicle. Ben Kinnaman | In conversation Uncrewed Systems Technology | December/January 2023 Kinnaman with a diver propulsion device run by the OpenSea platform. Some of these devices have automated modes, enabling them to be summoned from the seabed