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

23 where the team works to establish a basic, robust operational system or what is termed a minimum viable product. This phase takes the vehicle, for example, up to technology readiness level 6 (TRL 6). Phase 2 takes the development further, by adding features and applications, culminating in a system at TRL 8. Continuous testing and development accompany any changes to the feature set, helping to refine the system. Phase 3 takes the system to TRL 9, yielding a commercial product ready for distribution, complete with full documentation and training materials developed for operators and depot-level support. The OpenSea platform is being evolved to make it more robust and useful, primarily with the aid of feedback from the deployed systems. “We are hearing from manufacturing partners and end-users every day, in commercial, government and science applications. This feedback could be bug reports and issues that need to be addressed, or they could be feature suggestions. Our team is constantly rolling the feedback into OpenSea through our release schedule and into the development roadmap.” Future developments Beyond this routine process are some key developments that Greensea plans to bring out over the next 2 years. The first is native support for the US Department of Defense’s Unmanned Maritime Autonomy Architecture (UMAA). Support for the UMAA, Kinnaman stresses, will allow the defence community to benefit from operational experience of thousands of OpenSea users as well as the interfaces and building blocks from which to create defence applications. The second development is a reworking of OpenSea’s autonomy engine, which will include what Kinnaman refers to as a behaviour platform intended to enable the development of objective- based autonomous behaviours for working ROVs. “Now and over the past few years, so much of the work on autonomy has been focused on executing a defined set of tasks without a human in the loop. To elevate that relationship, and to let OpenSea evolve into our next-generation platform, we need to augment the supervision by a human operator. Instead of executing a list of tasks, we need to focus on accomplishing an objective. A vital part of this kind of autonomy is the computer’s ability to interpret the information provided by its sensors, so Greensea is working to integrate perception systems into OpenSea. This involves both perception software and perception platform support, as well as AI and machine learning architectures to interface well with higher-level autonomy applications, Kinnaman explains. “This type of autonomy will enable our vehicles to work without us in some pretty complex operations,” he says. Uncrewed Systems Technology | December/January 2023 Born in 1976 in North Carolina, Kinnaman grew up ‘on the beach’ in the southern area of the state and the islands of the Outer Banks. With no interest in study, he started work young, finding employment locally on tourist vessels and fishing boats. His route back into education began with pressure from his mother, who persuaded him to apply to Davidson College, the local liberal arts institution. He was accepted and won a scholarship, starting as an arts major until an encounter with a professor (Dr John Swallow) in a required mathematics class precipitated a change of direction. “He kept me after class one day and spent about an hour showing me what math can do, using numbers to define and model physical systems. I was absolutely blown away,” he recalls. He left Davidson with a Bachelor’s degree in physics and independent studies in computational physics in 1998. Work as a self-employed salvage diver followed, before he joined marine services contractor Phoenix International, hired by Michael Kutzleb, one of Phoenix’s founders, whom he regards as a mentor. “He gave me the opportunity to move into engineering, and Phoenix supported me going back to school.” Kinnaman subsequently earned a Master’s degree in Mechanical Engineering and Control Systems from Johns Hopkins University in 2006. While at Phoenix, he was involved with the water-based search for the wreckage of the Space Shuttle Columbia, which crashed in February 2003. “There was no software framework for organising the data from the waterborne searches, so I sat at a table in a volunteer fire department and started writing,” he says. “That was my transition point from looking for things underwater to writing software to help look for things underwater.” Kinnaman founded Greensea in 2006. For the first decade, the company was small, and Kinnaman was “chief architect, chief software developer and primary floor sweeper”. The company now employs more than 70 people, six of whom are department heads who report directly to Kinnaman, who describes his current role as that of a traditional CEO. Ben Kinnaman