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

22 In conversation | Ben Kinnaman The third is Open Manager, known as OpenMNGR, which Kinnaman describes as an autonomy executive, an application that provides a link between autonomous decision-making software and OpenSea. OpenFLS is the fourth, serving as a sonar processing application that supports almost all the forward-looking imaging sonar systems currently on the market, he says. In addition to data processing, OpenFLS also provides technologies including feature detection, SLAM routines for stabilising a navigation system, target tracking and closed-loop control, plus closed-loop feature-relative positioning of sonar data. Finally, OpenBT is a behaviour tree- derived engine for autonomous systems. Interfaces galore Naturally, OpenSea is also designed to run third-party applications, and to do so it provides a wide range of interfaces for them. “We have the ‘down and in’ interfaces that OpenSea needs to sit on top of computing platforms, then we have the ‘up and out’ interfaces that other applications use to work with OpenSea,” Kinnaman explains. “With the lower-level interfaces, OpenSea supports almost every industry interface, from CAN and CAN Open to Protobus and Modbus to serial TCP/IP and more. We also have the common industry standard interfaces. Natively, OpenSea uses LCM and will soon use DDS as the inner process interfaces. “We publish all those interfaces, and provide build and software utilities to help people connect to them.” The company also supports other open architecture platforms, such as the Robot Operating System (ROS), providing ROS bridges and translation layers. “It is not uncommon at all, especially in the academic community, to have a pretty big ROS stack interfacing with an OpenSea platform, although it is less common in defence and commercial applications,” he says. Greensea also provides support for several proprietary third-party control and autonomy packages, as well as a handful of other open architecture systems. For customers and partners who want to develop their own applications to run on OpenSea, the company provides a software developer kit (SDK), which Kinnaman says contains “all the keys to the kingdom”. In the SDK are the APIs and ICDs, the latter also including all the interfaces and examples for interfacing with the OpenSea suite of applications. Greensea also makes bespoke kits for many of its robot manufacturer partners. The ‘easy’ button One option aimed at customers who want a ready-made computing environment on their vehicles into which they can integrate applications is the OpenSea Hub. This is an embedded processor with a high-density I/O module associated with it, usually implemented through an FPGA chip. Kinnaman describes the Hub as “the easy button” – a stable, proven hardware platform that comes with OpenSea installed, along with essentially everything needed to plug it in and start developing a robot. “It shortcuts the need for porting OpenSea onto a new hardware platform, or a new OS, or creating a new build environment,” he says. “It is a platform that is known and understood, and that helps manage risk and cost.” Work with partners on their projects can start at almost any stage in the process, he emphasises. “Sometimes we start very early and are literally there at the table when they start drawing the concepts on the whiteboard. At that point it is easy to provide the Hub as the ‘brain’. “Sometimes the conversation begins much later, maybe even after years of operating a mature product that they now want to advance with new technologies but whose current architecture inhibits that. In that case, we might replace the processor on the vehicle with the Hub, or port OpenSea onto their existing hardware.” Kinnaman also notes that Greensea is releasing a new product in late 2022 called OpenSea Edge. This is a vehicle- agnostic autonomy system for ROVs supporting seafloor to over-the-horizon comms, video and sonar perception systems. It also supports third-party AI/ML libraries. OpenSea Edge is a strapdown solution for untethered autonomy on subsea robotics. Greensea began deploying it in several defence applications in early 2022. Phased development Greensea characterises the development it undertakes with partners as a process divided into four phases, numbered 0 to 3. Phase 0 concentrates on fundamental requirements, and involves discussions about deciding how OpenSea can be of most value. It culminates in a technical roadmap. Phase 1 is about initial development, December/January 2023 | Uncrewed Systems Technology The ability to run many and diverse vehicles, such as this hull service robot from Armach Robotics (also part of the Greensea group), comes from the platform’s open architecture and multiple interfaces