Mission Critical November 2015

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DEEP SECRETS

UUVS UNCOVER SHIPWRECKS

Inside This Issue: UARRC Brings Unmanned Business to Las Vegas Can AI Tell Your Email Tone?

Drones to the Rescue in Vanuatu Cyclone

Mighty Small

Le pton Th erma l C a me ra s (Actu a l Size )

See What Lepton Can Do! www.flir.com/unmanned 1.805.690.5097

EDITOR’S MESSAGE

On a New Mission

Danielle Lucey Editor

‘

It’s no longer

necessary to parse out the commercial and defense markets for unmanned aircraft into two separate things.

They are one in the

Mission Critical magazine has been the premier publication from AUVSI focused on the commercial market for unmanned systems for the past five years.

In that time span, the industry has taken massive leaps, and so has AUVSI. We have seen drones deliver packages in Europe and in experiments in the United States. We have seen them used for pipeline inspection. We have seen the implementation of artificial intelligence software and robots into hospitals. We have had Global Hawks flying over tsunamis and earthquakes. We have had UUVs cap oil wells in the Gulf of Mexico and sail all the way from California to Australia.

Here at AUVSI, we have made the determination that it’s no longer necessary to parse out the commercial and defense markets for unmanned aircraft into two separate things. They are one in the same, the technologies each feeding each other as this industry goes from its infancy to a thriving marketplace.

In light of that change, this will be the final issue of Mission Critical. However, the content will not be lost. Many of the departments that you have come to love will still exist and be integrated into AUVSI’s flagship publication, Unmanned Systems magazine, which has been in publication for 33 years.

It’s hard to be sad about a publication ending when it really just typifies that unmanned systems and robots are here to stay and aren’t just the latest hot button issue or trend. I would like to thank all the writers, designers and advertisers that invested their time and money in making this start-up magazine work.

To keep reading a quality unmanned systems and robotics magazine like this one, I encourage you to go to www.AUVSI.org and see the news options available to you both online and in print.

same, the technologies each feeding each other as this industry goes from its infancy to a thriving marketplace.

’

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UNSURPASSED IN UNMANNED – NOVATEL HAS HIT MORE FIRSTS We are the world’s leader in high precision positioning products for unmanned applications, helping our customers achieve many firsts in GPS positioning: • The first landing of an unmanned helicopter on a moving ship.

• The first unmanned in-air refueling.

• The first … to do a lot of things that are still classified.

No other company offers our breadth of product and integration expertise for air, land or sea.

Visit NovAtel.com/Unmanned.

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CONTENTS FEATURES

14 Fast Lane

5D Robotics Integrates Autonomy With United Rentals

22

Deep Secrets UUVs Uncover Countless Shipwrecks Worldwide in Fraction of the Time

DEPARTMENTS

4 Essential Components

  

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Danielle Lucey Editor dlucey@auvsi.org

INDEX OF ADVERTISERS FLIR Systems Inc.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Inside Front Cover Novatel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS Freelance writer Nick Adde has covered technology and personnel matters, primarily relating to the U.S. armed forces, since 1983.

Cover Photo: The Boeing Co.

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Ron Bates Account Executive rbates@auvsi.org Wes Morrison Account Executive wmorrison@auvsi.org

Karen Aho, a freelance writer in western Massachusetts, reports and writes on science, business and housing. She can be reached at k.aho@msn.com.

Gaea L. Honeycutt is chief creative officer at Brazen Maven Marketing Communications and is a freelance writer.

Jeffrey N. Ross is an automotive journalist who grew up in Detroit and now lives in Jacksonville, Florida.

Rich Tuttle is a longtime aerospace and defense journalist and contributor to Mission Critical.

Timeline Robots in the ER

MISSION CRITICAL CONTACTS Brett Davis Vice President of Publications and Marketing bdavis@auvsi.org

iRobot Roomba Now App Controlled Rethink Robotics Releases Sawyer Robotic Hand Can Feel

Q&A Arie Perry, IAI’s TaxiBot

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Uncanny Valley

Watson Analyzes Email Tone

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Technology Gap

Hackers Could Impede Driverless Technology

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State of the Art AUVSI Foundation Geared Up for 2016 Competitions

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Spotlight

UARRC Takes a Gamble on Las Vegas

20 Testing, Testing

CRASAR Summer Institute Focuses on Data in Disasters

26 End Users

Drones Aid After Cyclone Pam

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Carnegie Mellon Invents Robot Hand That Feels Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have outfitted a robot hand with a fiber optic sensor that could provide its soft “skin” with more feedback.

It has 14 strain sensors in each finger of a new stretchable optical sensing material that can detect contact and measure force.

“If you want robots to work autonomously and to react safely to unexpected forces in everyday environments, you need robotic hands that have more sensors than is typical today,” says Yong-Lae Park, assistant professor of robotics. “Human skin contains thousands of tactile sensory units only in the fingertip and a spider has hundreds of mechanoreceptors on each leg, but even a stateof-the-art humanoid such as NASA’s Robonaut has only 42 sensors in its hand and wrist.”

Optical fibers cut down on a big problem with typical robot sensors — way less wiring and interference. Using a soft robot hand also allows safer potential human interaction.

Roomba 980 owners can control when and how the vacuum cleans from afar.

iRobot Releases App-Controlled Roomba IRobot announced that it released the Roomba 980, which is the first of its robotic vacuums to integrate adaptive navigation with visual localization and cloud-connected app control. This means that owners will be able to control their Roomba from anywhere.

“Leveraging the cloud and mapping technologies, robots gain a better understanding of their environment, and customers are provided with more control,” says Colin Angle, chairman and CEO of iRobot. “Looking ahead, these technologies will also enable expanded capabilities for connected robots in the smart home.”

The Roomba connects to the home’s Wi-Fi network so scheduled cleanings can be changed from afar. Users can also choose different cleaning modes for when the robot is on a carpet or if it needs to take a second pass on a certain area.

The Roomba 980 went on sale Sept. 17, and it costs $899.

Rethink Robotics Releases Sawyer Robot to Global Market

Sawyer adds AI to factory robotics.

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Rethink Robotics announced that its Sawyer collaborative robot is available for purchase for use in factories around the world.

The product, which was announced in March, is a single-armed robot that can tend to machines, test circuit boards and handle other precise tasks. Unlike many factory robots, the robot can “feel” its way into fixtures or machines with varying parts and positions, leveraging artificial intelligence.

The robot weighs 42 pounds and features an eight-pound payload with seven degrees of freedom. It uses a Cognex camera to see and Rethink’s proprietary Robot Positioning System to gain spatial awareness.

General Electric has been testing the robot for a month and will deploy the first operational Sawyer at a GE Lighting plant in Hendersonville, North Carolina.

“The ability to deploy a smart, collaborative robot like Sawyer provides a significant flexibility advantage to our production team, while still meeting our worldclass quality, precision and speed standards,” says Kelley Brooks, global advanced manufacturing and engineering leader at GE Lighting. “Utilizing this technology is an integral part of our Brilliant Factory initiative to connect all parts of the supply chain from product design, to engineering, to the factory floor and beyond in order to deliver customized LED solutions for our customers.”

ESSENTIAL COMPONENTS Clearpath Robotics Enters Self-Driving Vehicle Industry With GE Backing Canada’s Clearpath Robotics announced that it is shifting into the self-driving vehicle industry with the announcement of its OTTO warehouse robot.

The company, which has traditionally made field and service robots, designed OTTO to transport heavy loads in industrial environments. The company likens the technology in the robot to Google’s self-driving car, since it uses “dynamic and efficient transport” in increasingly congested areas.

Kansas State University and PrecisionHawk are using the company’s unmanned aerial systems to turn aerial images of corn fields into apps.

Photos: Rethink Robotics, iRobot Corp., PrecisionHawk, Clearpath Robotics.

Kansas State, PrecisionHawk Develop Corn Production App In mid-September, Kansas State University announced that it has developed a partnership with Raleigh, North Carolina’s PrecisionHawk Inc. to develop an unmanned aircraft and an app that can manage data collected while performing agricultural surveys.

“Our newly formed partnership with PrecisionHawk really illustrates how targeted corporate-sponsored research can advance not only private sector interest, but also the university’s mission of research, education and outreach at the same time,” says Kent Glasscock, president of the Kansas State University Institute for Commercialization, which facilitated the research partnership. “Because of how well the partnership is tailored for these interests, it’s a real win-win for both Kansas State University and PrecisionHawk.”

The collaboration will be a four-year project.

“Unmanned aerial vehicles are an emerging technology that will support precision agriculture, and Kansas State University’s expertise in building and protecting global food systems makes us a great fit for this kind of collaboration,” says Karen Burg, vice president for research and professor of chemical engineering.

Agronomy experts from K-State will help PrecisionHawk create apps and programs that turn aerial images of cornfields into more useful data. Eventually the project will branch out and focus on more than just corn, possibly including

soybeans and sorghum to name a few.

The apps will include information on yield potential and plant growth.

“There has been a big boom in UAS use and in the data being collected,” says Ignacio Ciampitti, assistant professor of agronomy at K-State and the project’s lead. “The key issue now is not whether this technology can collect the images we need, but how we can translate those pictures into scientifically sound and useful information. With this project, we’re creating tools that farmers and agronomists can use on these pictures to get information about a crop, such as its potential productivity, and then adjust their practices based on the tools’ results.”

The university is running flights out of its Salina campus to determine the best photo and video sensors to use. Then Ciampitti will take that information and help develop algorithms that can be converted into software or an app, which will be placed on PrecisionHawk’s Algorithm Marketplace. The marketplace already has apps that can count plans in a field and estimate crop health.

“Aerial data is an exciting and new component of precision agriculture, but in order to leverage its full potential, growers need more than imagery from a UAV,” says Allison Ferguson, director of education and research partnerships at PrecisionHawk.

Clearpath likens the technology in OTTO to the Google self-driving car.

OTTO navigates a warehouse facility without relying on external infrastructure, instead using path planning and object avoidance. It moves at up to 4.5 mph while transporting up to 3,300 pounds of goods.

“North American manufacturers are constantly under pressure to find new ways to gain an edge against low-cost offshore competition. Traditional automation is saturating, but what about the more complex tasks too difficult or expensive to automate?” says Matt Rendall, CEO and cofounder of Clearpath Robotics. “We created OTTO to reinvent material transport and give North American manufacturers a new edge.”

One of Clearpath’s first OTTO customers is GE, which the company partnered with in 2013 and now has GE Ventures as one of its strategic investors.

“We believe robotics will drastically improve the industries that GE serves,” says Ralph Taylor-Smith, managing director of GE Ventures.

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ROBOTS

IN THE ER

A History of Robotic Surgery

1992

1984 The first robot that ever assisted in a surgical procedure, Arthrobot, was used for an orthopedic procedure at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver in March 1984. The robot was mounted on the patient’s hip.

Developed at the Imperial College London, the PROBOT assisted in the world’s first robotic prostate surgery. In the same year, the ROBOTDOC from the company Integrated Surgical Systems was used for precision fittings in hip replacement surgery. Previously, new hips were fitted using a mallet and rasp to carve out a place for the implant.

2000 The FDA approved the da Vinci Surgical System for adult and pediatric use in a number of procedures. The agency has since approved updates to the premier robotic surgery platform.

1985 The Unimation Puma 200, initially developed as the Programmable Universal Machine for Assembly for General Motors, was tweaked for medical use.

In 1985, it placed a needle during a brain biopsy, guided by computer tomography guidance, a noninvasive method that uses an X-ray to image a cross-section of a body.

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1998 In July 1998, the ZEUS robotic surgery system was used for a fallopian tube reconnection.

The next year, the robot was used in a beating heart coronary artery bypass graft.

TIMELINE The adoption of robotic and artificial intelligence platforms in operating rooms has been slow and steady. While there is a rise in the use of the systems, the systems have also come under controversy, accused of causing complications and coming at a high price tag.

2011 Robotic surgery began gaining popularity. In 2011, more than 1.5 million procedures were documented worldwide.

2006

2008

Dr. Carlo Pappone’s Robosurgeon performed the first unassisted heart surgery, using a backlog of 10,000 data entries on real-world operation scenarios.

The University of Calgary used the NeuroArm to perform a neurosurgical operational. The system was designed to be used for procedures inside of an MRI.

2009 The da Vinci was released for an initial price of $1.75 million. There are now more than 3,000 units deployed in the world.

2013 In an FDA survey, patients of surgeons using the da Vinci robot reported they had less bleeding, quicker recovery and fewer complications versus traditional surgery methods. However, the machines were not without controversy. Some critics differed with the report, saying they saw an increase in the number of patient-reported complications.

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I AI ’S TAX I BOT

ARIE PERRY 8

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Israel Aerospace Industries has developed a robotic autonomous airplane towing system, called the TaxiBot. Arie Perry, robotics directorate scientist for IAI, discusses with Mission Critical how the system could make airports more energy efficient and could decrease taxiing wait times.

What is TaxiBot?

How does TaxiBot work?

TaxiBot is an innovative concept of a tow bar-less aircraft towing tractor built to operationally tow airplanes from gate to takeoff with engines stopped, also known as dispatch towing. Today there is safety driver on board, because airport authorities do not yet allow such movement, and insurance companies do not yet want to insure unmanned vehicles in airports. However, TaxiBot subsystems are designed to be part of an unmanned autonomous vehicle.

Dispatch towing using standard tow bar-less tractors — ones that hold airplanes by their nose landing gear, or NLG — have been tried in the industry for 35 years unsuccessfully, mainly because of two reasons: Loads induced on the NLG decreased its life cycle, which was rejected by all airframe manufacturers, [and] pilots were not in control during taxiing, which was rejected by pilots and pilots associations.

Introducing TaxiBot is solving those challenges. Its unique NLG clamping and control system is keeping loads on the NLG within manufacturer-defined fatigue load envelopes in real time at all times during the dispatch towing, such that there is no decrease in NLG expected life cycle. This meets NLG manufacturers’ requirements.

The pilot is “driving” TaxiBot from the cockpit using the usual taxiing means, a tiller for steering and braking pedals for slowing and stopping, with no driver intervention. So the pilot is always in control during the entire taxiing phase, meeting pilots’ taxiing requirements.

TaxiBot, the vehicle, never slows or stops a convoy — only the airplane does that by its main landing gear, operated by pilot brakes, lowering significantly the fatigue loads on the NLG. Accelerating TaxiBot and a towed airplane is performed by the vehicle much like an automatic car in drive gear.

It’s always slightly pulling, accelerating the airplane to the allowed speed on taxiway segments. Start-and-stop commands from a pilot, using pedals, are picked up by load sensors and sent to the vehicle control system, decelerating the vehicle at the same rate as the airplane, preventing loads on the NLG from rising.

What are the benefits of using TaxiBot at airports?

TaxiBot towing saves fuel to the airliners by 85 percent, decreases significantly the emission of noxious gases such as carbon dioxide, reduces noise pollution by 85 percent in and around airports, and reduces noise during taxiing by 59 percent.

TaxiBot enables taxiing to start immediately by the end of aircraft pushback, since there is no need to wait for engines start up. This also presents a significant time saving at gate areas, reducing gates congestion and improving throughput, especially in airports with cul-de-sac arrangements.

Q&A

Does it require the modification of any existing systems?

Another important TaxiBot feature is that its introduction does not require any modification to any of an airplane’s systems whatsoever — this was one of the main development rationales. The only needed changes will be the introduction of a supplement to aircraft flight manuals. Airports will have to adapt procedures for the use of TaxiBot, and service providers will have to train and instruct maintenance personnel for TaxiBot. Airports may also have to define back-drive service roads from runways to gate areas.

What sort of training is required to use the system?

Taxiing with TaxiBot is practically transparent to the pilot, using the usual taxiing means — a tiller for steering and braking pedals for slowing or stopping.

Acceleration is provided by the vehicle automatically to a predefined speed, and the pilot can slow or stop the airplane if the speed is not right for him.

Pilot training is performed via computer-based training, taking only 30 to 45 minutes on any PC or laptop. After this e-learning session, a pilot is ready to takeoff with passengers. There is no need for additional training, simulator or practical, with an instructor, as TaxiBot handling is exactly the same as taxiing on jet engine power, only the procedures are slightly different. This process is used today on a daily basis in Frankfurt [Germany] on Boeing 737 commercial flights for Lufthansa and was part of pilot workload test performed during the TaxiBot certification process.

Photo: Israel Aerospace Industries.

TaxiBot is now operational in Frankfurt and being tested in France. What has been the response so far?

In general the pilot was very positive.

They said that it was very intuitive and there is almost no difference between taxiing today with engines on and taxiing with TaxiBot. Ground personnel TaxiBot operators had to be instructed and trained to operate the vehicle, but after a short adaptation period they are comfortable with the system. Service

IAI’s TaxiBot is currently being used at Frankfurt Airport.

rate and mission success rate were improved during last seven months of operation in Frankfurt, to a 99 percent service rate and 100 percent completion of missions started.

Is there any impact on airport safety from using TaxiBot? No. TaxiBot dispatch towing has three phases, with a safety driver on board at all times. Pushback is performed exactly as today, by the driver in driver control mode.

When completed, control is switched over to the pilot in pilot control mode, from which moment the pilot is in control and driver operation is disabled until taxiing is completed. Upon completion of the taxiing to the runway, engines start up and the NLG is disconnected, with the pilot switching command again to the driver to drive back TaxiBot to the gate area.

So TaxiBot is under driver or pilot — human — control at all times during pushback, dispatch towing and return phases.

There is no safety impact on the airport; only a procedural adaptation is needed.

How did you come up with the concept, and how long did it take to come to fruition?

The idea came after I participated as a referee in a student robotic project competition, where students presented a small Lego-built vehicle towing a Lego airplane and following white lines. In IAI’s innovation team, we considered the idea interesting and started to investigate the subject, gathered information.

[We] read a history of dispatch towing attempts during the 1980s and 1990s and learned the reasons for abandoning the idea. After performing a preliminary

business plan, which turned out to be promising, we decided to analyze the problem in depth, and after finding solutions to the abovementioned challenges, we presented the concept to IAI management, who then found it to be eligible for investment. Everything else is history.

It took seven years from initial concept to maturity, including the following phases: preliminary study, patents application, preliminary and detailed design, proof of concept demonstrator, first prototype, integration, testing and certification, and in-service evaluation in Frankfurt by Lufthansa. Narrow Body TaxiBot is operational today in the Frankfurt Airport.

What are your future plans for TaxiBot? The NB TaxiBot model is in the entry to service period, while extending certification coverage for all narrow-body airplanes. WB [wide-body] TaxiBot is today in its final development testing phase toward certification process on Boeing 747-400s, planned in the beginning of 2016, and we estimate we will obtain certification for the first airplane by the end of 2016.

In the short term, the main focus of the program is to introduce TaxiBot gradually to more airports around the world. For the longer term, autonomous TaxiBot return-to-gate ability will be fully developed and then gradually introduced in airports requiring such a solution. Introducing fuel cell technology will follow for further system improvement toward a fully green TaxiBot [the current TaxiBot fuel is diesel].

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UNCANNY VALLEY

WATCH YOUR TONE IBM’s Watson Analyzes Emails Using AI

IBM’s new Watson Tone Analyzer is intended to do for the “tone” of written electronic communications what a spell checker does for misspelled words in an email.

While reading a message and judging its tone “comes naturally to humans,” there are times when “the tone may be overlooked, undesired or not conveyed well,” says IBMs’s Rama Akkiraju.

Can a computer solve the problem by automatically and accurately detecting tone and then refining it? It’s obviously a more complex problem than merely correcting misspelled words, and to get a handle on it, researchers at IBM are focusing on the fields of artificial intelligence and cognitive science.

The Tone Analyzer is the latest addition to what is known as the Watson Developer Cloud, which gives code writers an opportunity to build software with “cognitive computing intelligence.” The Watson computer itself was introduced in 2011 and designed to “think” rather than calculate. It was most famously used as a contestant on the television game show “Jeopardy!,” in which it won $1 million in a special competition.

The results of two years of research are promising, says Akkiraju, distinguished engineer and master inventor at IBM Watson User Technologies. The technology gives feedback on the emotional, social and writing tone of a particular text and suggests words that best reflect the kind of personality you want to project in a message.

Was the last email you got

cheerful or an angry missive? Scan this QR code with your smartphone to to find out what Watson

thinks.

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But, like a spell check, you can also turn it off.

“Whether or not to use it and whether or not you want to use the recommendations. It is your choice,” Akkiraju says. At the same time, if you want to write, for example, a particularly angry email, you can use the Tone Analyzer to confirm that your anger will be accurately perceived.

More generally, “it’s about helping individuals avoid regret” — knowing the tone you’re using “and being comfortable with it,” Akkiraju says. “We’ve all sent emails that we’ve regretted sending and wish we had slept on them, that we had that inner critic guiding us.”

But that’s not the Tone Analyzer’s only use, or even its primary one. “We envision, specifically, use cases for it in scenarios such as personal and professional branding, marketing and communications, and public relations,” Akkiraju says.

In public relations, “let’s say some company [represented by a PR firm] had acquired a new company, or maybe its stock went down, or a lawsuit was filed, or a new product was released” and there was intense media coverage.

Some PR firms use a technology that allows them to quickly evaluate coverage and to classify it as good or bad. Tone analysis could go beyond this to provide a more sophisticated and deeper understanding of the coverage and, therefore, how to respond.

Outside researchers who have worked with the Tone Analyzer — it’s now in the “open experiment” stage, which allows them to experiment with various applications — have said it could help students to write more clearly.

One critic says it could, in fact, do this for “students who lack normal ability to

judge tone in written communications.

It could also be very useful for gifted writers who want to address a particular audience with which they may not be familiar. Another educational use might be as an automated tool to help teachers detect emotional issues they had not previously noted in their students.”

But, says this critic in an email to IBM — one of several the company has released to the public — this “has some less-than-savory implications for privacy. Not every writer wants their emotions detected. Careful thought should be given to who is given access to this powerful tool and under what conditions it is used. It would probably not be beneficial for university professors to begin grading student essays on the basis of emotional and social tone conveyed rather than the academic merit of the work.”

And, says this critic, called “LizaLoop,” it may be true that judging tone comes naturally to humans, as Akkiraju says, “but there is a wide spectrum of ability in this skill.” It’s “an interaction between the author and the judge, not solely dependent on the author. ...”

Today, tone analysis works with text of any length, but focuses on specific words and word choices.

“We are working toward processing multiple words and phrases and sentences at a time, so that we can understand context and analyze the tone based on those things,” Akkiraju says. “Those are our current research topics — work in progress.” And, “depending on how our experiments go and how our results look, we will be making a decision on whether and when this will come up in tone analysis. But, yes, we are actively working on those things.”

Image: IBM.

By Rich Tuttle

TECHNOLOGY GAP

Who Got the Keys to the Jeep?

Hackers Could Impede Driverless Technology

Photo: iStockPhoto.com.

By Rich Tuttle It was an attention-getting moment for the auto industry. Executives were riveted by a media report that two researchers had taken control of a Jeep Cherokee by remotely hacking into its electronics.

Wired magazine’s Andy Greenberg reported on July 21 that researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek had gone in through the car’s radio to take control of windshield wipers, air conditioning, steering, transmission and brakes. It was an experiment, with Greenberg at the wheel.

“I was driving 70 mph on the edge of downtown St. Louis when the exploit began to take hold,” Greenberg wrote.

“Though I hadn’t touched the dashboard, the vents ... started blasting cold air at the maximum setting, chilling the sweat on my back through the in-seat climate control system. Next the radio switched to the local hip hop station and began blaring Skee-Lo at full volume. I spun the control knob left and hit the power button, to no avail. Then the windshield wipers turned on, and wiper fluid blurred the glass.”

At one point, “ ... my accelerator stopped working. As I frantically pressed the pedal and watched the RPMs climb, the Jeep lost half its speed, then slowed to a crawl. This occurred just as I reached a long overpass, with no shoulder to offer an escape. The experiment had ceased to be fun.”

Other media outlets picked up the story, and on July 24 Fiat Chrysler Automobiles recalled 1.4 million Jeeps.

But the event hadn’t happened in a vacuum. In 2014, Sen. Ed Markey released a report detailing gaps in how car companies were securing cars against hackers. On Feb. 8 this year, CBS’s “60 Minutes” ran a story about how the Pentagon’s DARPA was using a laptop to take control of a car. The next day, Markey and Sen. Richard Blumenthal introduced legislation directing the government to establish standards to secure cars and protect drivers’ privacy.

On May 28, lawmakers sent a letter to carmakers asking how they managed cybersecurity and how they would address possible vulnerabilities.

On July 14, a week before the Wired story, major carmakers banded together to form an Intelligence Sharing and Analysis Center. Like ISACs in other industries, its purpose is to defend against cyber attacks. So when the Wired story broke, it was quickly noticed by the Auto ISAC, says Booz Allen’s Jonathan Allen. “Somebody caught that in the first few minutes.”

Booz was chosen to identify the structure, scope, procedures and policies of the Auto ISAC, and Allen is a principal in the firm’s commercial business.

“You’ve got to be ready for [a] cyber incident,” he says. The idea is to develop an “incident response framework.

Even if it’s not an attack on your own organization, you still will execute an incident response, because you’ve got to be ready if it is yours.”

When it was disclosed that Jeep had been “attacked,” Allen says, “I can pretty much assure that the other OEMs had a meeting” and “treated it like an incident within their own environment.”

ISACs can be traced back to the late 1990s, Allen says. “As critical infrastructure continued to be threatened by both physical and cyber risks, there needed to be a way that industry could talk in a safe manner without crossing anticorruption or antitrust laws. How does a company share information within an environment and not get in trouble at the end of the day? Also, how does the information get shared and get protected? You don’t

want to necessarily expose vulnerabilities to the world. ... Within the ecosystem of critical infrastructure, or in the case here of automotive, an attack on one is an attack on all.”

The problem today is “more oneoff, one vehicle,” he says. But as cars increasingly become connected to the Internet, and therefore become more vulnerable to attack, the risk will only grow. By one estimate, 250 million vehicles, some of them driverless, will be linked to the Internet by 2020. The good news, says Allen, is that the OEMs are “getting ahead of this now to be ready when it’s a much bigger issue.”

The OEMs share information with each other to address the problem, but they may someday have to tap into the U.S. government’s vast intelligence resources. It’s not clear how this would work since there’s always been a wall between the private and federal sectors, for good reason. But, says Cedric Leighton, a former intelligence official, “we’re living in a bit of a different time,” and because threats must be thwarted as they occur, there will have to be a way for the commercial sector to quickly and easily get information from the government.

Click this QR code to watch hackers take over a Jeep.

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STATE OF PLAY

2016 Robotics Competition Offerings Robust These days, everybody loves STEM. The initiative, which focuses on educating students in science, technology, engineering and math, is evident everywhere from the White House Science Fair to the the hordes of new robotics camps for kids.

The AUVSI Foundation has been hot on this trend for decades, and its 2016 lineup of competitions covers a wide range of topics and locations.

SAN DIEGO International RoboSub Competition July 25 – 21 Cosponsored by the U.S. Office of Naval Research, like all the foundation’s maritime challenges, RoboSub is the premier autonomous underwater vehicle competition for high school and college students of the 2016 lineup. Held in the SSC Pacific TRANSDEC pool, which has acoustics that mirror the open ocean, teams from around the world perform tasks, such as navigation, torpedo-like targeting and surfacing, all in autonomous mode.

OAHU, HAWAII Maritime RobotX Challenge December 11 – 18 The second ever Maritime RobotX Challenge will be held in the United States for the first time in 2016. Previously held in Singapore, the participants from around the globe use the same WAM-V surface craft to perform tasks with an emphasis on autonomy. Teams must maintain a website, submit a journal paper, participate in a design presentation of their system integration, and attempt five tasks without assistance.

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STATE OF THE ART

ROCHESTER, MICHIGAN Intelligent Ground Vehicle Competition June 3 – 6 One of the longest standing competitions, IGVC tests students’ ability to team up and create an autonomous ground robot that can navigate a very large obstacle course, constructed on a field on the campus of Oakland University. The top prize goes to students who do well in the navigation challenge, a design competition and an interoperability challenge.

PATUXENT RIVER, MARYLAND Student Unmanned Air Systems Competition June 22 – 26 Held annually on the grounds of Naval Air Station Patuxent River since 2002, college and some high school students fly unmanned aircraft they have assembled in a series of flights to determine a hidden message, with one letter each written on different waypoints the aircraft have to fly over. While some teams use hobby shop bodies for their aircraft, many opt to make the systems themselves.

VIRGINIA BEACH, VIRGINIA International RoboBoat Competition July 4 – 10 This maritime surface vessel competition, first held in 2008 in Orlando, features students racing around a pond, performing tasks such as obstacle avoidance, acoustic beacon positioning, an interoperability challenge and automated docking.

ATLANTA BATON ROUGE, LOUISIANA National SeaPerch Challenge May 20 – 22 The National SeaPerch Challenge is a culmination of numerous local challenges held throughout the year. At the event, middle and high school students must navigate the underwater SeaPerch platform they built through an underwater obstacle course.

International Aerial Robotics Competition August 2016 Held at the same time as the Beijing version of this competition, the IARC has challenged students for three decades with unmanned aerial tasks of increasing difficulty. Students earn awards for best paper, presentation, systems integration and innovative design, along with attempting the competition’s often impossible goals; not every year has an overall winner.

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FAST LANE 5D Robotics Takes Pragmatic Approach to Integrating Autonomy in Driving

By Jeffrey N. Ross

There’s no doubt that, someday, autonomous vehicles will be the answer to improved safety and convenience for motorists on major roadways, but one company is looking at a near-term strategy to integrate this technology into smaller-scale vehicles to complement existing mass transit in order to reduce unnecessary congestion.

Based in Carlsbad, California, 5D Robotics is currently developing 14

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new applications for autonomous driving features in vehicles and equipment that will bring this technology into the industrial sector while also laying the ground work for a revolution in personal transportation.

Now, “revolution” might be a strong word seeing as how numerous companies — including major automakers — are developing autonomous vehicles, but the combination of the technology

being used by 5D Robotics and the way it is being implemented in the real world is how this company is standing out. Instead of focusing on larger passenger vehicles, 5D Robotics’ technology is being developed for use on single-passenger vehicles such as a Segway or even vehicles that would be needed to transport goods with planned usage in smaller, more controlled areas including work yards and private subdivisions.

David Bruemmer, CEO of 5D Robotics, has been in the robotics industry for more than 20 years, and he feels the technology this company is working on is the “future of robotics” in that it is able to “skirt the [regulatory] barriers and provide immediate benefits.” The crucial element to the 5D Robotics vehicles is the use of ultra-wideband positioning, which Bruemmer says provides guaranteed accuracy and reliable performance and is better

5D’s technology would give United Rentals equipment two centimeters’ accuracy for autonomous navigation.

than vision-based sensors (such as lasers) that can be affected by poor weather conditions. UWB is even superior to GPS, in that it can be used indoors.

The autonomous features that 5D Robotics is developing are essentially broken down into three main autonomous functions: virtual rail, virtual tether and virtual fence.

Virtual rail is a preprogrammed route – or an imaginary rail – that allows the equipment to follow a certain path. Such vehicles are already used in some fields, including vehicle manufacturing, where carts can automatically deliver parts through a plant without any human interaction. Similarly, there’s also the virtual tether that allows the equipment to follow a person, which would be beneficial on a job site where equipment needs to be shuttled around and can be operated by a controller or use the UWB tags. Virtual tether can also be applied to airborne vehicles such as a drone to perform tasks such as pipelines and power lines, and it is actually safer than a conventional drone that is flown by a user on the ground. Finally, there’s the virtual fence that puts boundaries on the operation of vehicles whether they are manned or unmanned.

Photos: 5D Robotics.

TEAMING WITH UNITED RENTALS The real-world applications for such vehicles are limitless, but rather than trying to develop autonomous technology for road-going vehicles, 5D Robotics is focusing on vehicles

Applying autonomy to fork lifts adds convenience when loading cargo, according to 5D Robotics.

and equipment that can operate in a closed, privately owned environment. One such example is the work that 5D Robotics is currently doing with Stamford, Connecticutbased, United Rentals – the largest equipment-rental agency in the world with more than 880 locations across the U.S. and Canada alone.

United Rentals rents out everything from hand tools to heavy-duty construction equipment and tractor trailers, but this initial testing is being performed using scissor lifts.

The benefit here is the ability to navigate a work site with no human intervention and allow the equipment to self-park and self-load to an accuracy of within two centimeters.

Such technology could also be easily applied to fork lifts to add the extra convenience of self-loading cargo onto and off of trucks.

As a test bed, 5D Robotics has already equipped a United Rentals yard in Pico Rivera, California, with four of its location tags, which

covered the entire 120-acre site.

According to Bruemmer, this will provide “tremendous improvements in safety and efficiency” to United Rentals work sites by making sure that the vehicles don’t collide with each other or, more importantly, humans, and, if needed, all of the programmed virtual rails can be reconfigured within seconds.

A little further down the road, there’s also the ability for United Rentals to rent out such autonomous equipment, allowing the company to actually sell productivity to its customers. This would mean that the added safety and efficiency could then be applied to hundreds of thousands of job sites around the world, which led Bruemmer to refer to the partnership between 5D Robotics and United Rentals as an “easy slam dunk,” because of the closed ecosystems (limited entry points) and privately owned property.

“What we’ve done is that we’ve provided the world’s best positionMISSION CRITICAL

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ing and behavior solutions and put it in a package that is now very easy to bring and set up to these locations within minutes,” Bruemmer says. “It also allows them to handle the part of this that we [5D Robotics] don’t want to do, which is the sales, marketing, delivery and maintenance: all of the things they already do really well.”

SMALL TOWN AUTONOMY As much convenience as automated technology will bring to the industrial world, the possibilities are even further reaching in the residential sector. On this front, 5D Robotics is also teaming up with Accretive Investments Inc. to develop a unique use of autonomous technology for planned communities that have been proposed in Colorado and California.

Randy Goodson, CEO of Accretive Investments Inc., says that his company is planning two communities with a focus on healthy, environmentally friendly living and reduced automobile dependence. Autonomous vehicles would play into this equation by getting people to their destination. In Goodson’s scenarios, a person would be able to walk to dinner or the grocery store and then use app-based program similar to Uber that allows users to be picked up by small electric vehicles and taken to their chosen destination, and it would be most helpful if a person has heavy groceries to carry or if the weather has gotten bad.

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This backs up Bruemmer’s statement that “the basis for a revolution in smart mobility, because there’s no reason why instead of, say, a forklift it can’t be a pod that picks you up wherever you are and takes you to a train station or takes you to a metro in a fully automated shared mobility system.”

Such a technology could potentially benefit community residents in another way, which Goodson referred to as the “final mile.” This is the distance people must travel to get to mass transit locations, whether it be a park and ride lot, bus station or train terminal. From there, the person could enjoy the benefits of mass transit without having to worry about traffic. Bruemmer says that such a vehicle could be anything from a small chair or pod to a Polaris and Segway vehicle (essentially anything that utilizes drive-by-wire), and it would be able to operate on sidewalks, bike lanes and pedestrian paths and can travel at speeds of 5 to 7 mph.

In the communities being planned by Accretive Investments Inc., some of the costs of the technology, such as the sensors, will be incorporated into the homeowner association, but individual users will probably also have to pay a small fee to use the service. Goodson expects the technology to be operational at a planned community near Boulder, Colorado, within 18 months and the Lilac Hills Ranch, near San Diego, should be ready in two years.

These are private communities,

but 5D Robotics is looking for ways of giving this tech a broader scale reach to the public. A helpful aspect of this transportation goal is that many cities are now building new roads with wider sidewalks and/ or bike lines. Having the ability to integrate the autonomous technology into existing infrastructure is ultimately what will allow for the highest rate of success, and this would also reduce the amount of time it would take to get such vehicles operational.

Bruemmer says that the vehicles being developed by 5D Robotics don’t have the “regulatory issues unlike fully autonomous highway driving, which probably isn’t going to happen until 2025. We can start doing this stuff on sidewalks right now.”

“Right now” might be a little wishful thinking, but it is definitely an interesting technology that will likely be ready for use sooner rather than later. Whether it’s in a private work yard or in a master planned community, the UWB-based autonomous vehicle technology being developed by 5D Robotics is just another key step in the integration of autonomous driving features in our everyday lives.

“In the long run, this will become a ubiquitous form of intelligent transportation that will not necessarily replace existing cars and trains, but will transform our ecosystems into more intelligent, efficient and environmentally friendly settings,” says Bruemmer. 

USHERING in the future JOIN THE #IHPrevolution @RoboticsIHP

EXTENDING our capabilities HELPING the environment Intelligent robots are helping researchers, public entities and corporations in ways

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TRANSFORMING disaster relief STIMULATING the economy FOSTERING education IMPROVING research methods HANDLING dangerous tasks

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ENHANCING public safety

TAKING A GAMBLE ON LAS VEGAS Firm Seeks Revolutionary Unmanned Startups to Boost Nevada Industry

By Nick Adde

The five-person team that founded and runs the Unmanned Aerial and Robotics Resource Center in Las Vegas are not engineers. They have business and architecture backgrounds. But if their plans move forward as they intend, the city better known for entertaining risk takers at casinos would emerge as a magnet for engineers and designers, more interested in betting on their robotic ideas than numbers on dice or playing cards.

and test their ideas. UARRC would provide some money, as well as offices and testing spaces. In turn, the robotics developers would share a part of the equity of their companies with them.

When the group founded the UARRC 18 months ago, the central idea was to create a space where robotics entrepreneurs could develop

Rounding out the team are Curt Carlson, an architect and urban designer; Sallie Dobler, who manages construction; Michael J.

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“The goal of the facility is to serve as an incubator for commercial robotics and unmanned aerial system technologies in Nevada,” says Zachary B. Conine, one of the five principal partners and a cofounder of the group.

Russell, finance; and Brandon M. Wiegand, development.

Their idea took root when they entered and won a competition sponsored by Strong Cities Strong Communities, a program sponsored by the federal government aimed at promoting investments in urban areas.

“It takes all five of us to push together to get this thing off the ground,” Conine says.

With the $560,000 they won, the group identified a site in downtown Las Vegas that would be ideal.

Now the home of the minor leaguebaseball Las Vegas 51s, the Cashman Center would provide plenty of space for offices and outdoor testing.

They intend to encourage smaller firms — with perhaps as few as five employees — to come forward with their ideas.

“Like most incubators and accelerators, we provide office space and access to certain resources. As accelerators, [we] provide the money and the time frame in which to get things done. We [also] provide indoor and outdoor netted testing,” Conine says.

For the time being, the group remains committed to keeping the project in Las Vegas. They have es-

SPOTLIGHT A drawing of UARRC’s plans for offices and outdoor test space.

tablished working relationships with the University of Nevada Las Vegas, the College of Southern Nevada and the Clark County public school system as well.

They also convinced Paul Oh, a preeminent scholar in robotics engineering and technology, to leave his post at Drexel University’s engineering school and join them as their primary technical adviser.

New companies who sign on with UARRC would have access to Oh and experts in local academia, Conine says.

All too often, smaller companies are given two minutes to make their pitches. If they succeed, Conine says, support amounts to little more than providing them with a company logo, a pat on the back and wishes of good luck.

“Our goal is to be very flexible and provide the support each company needs. We think we’re unique in that we really don’t know which companies are going to go,” Conine says.

Photos: UARRC.

Emerging technologies begin with seedlings of an idea that take root and flourish, Conine says, citing the notion of placing an app on a telephone that enables a user to call a cab or car any time — the concept by which Uber arose.

“Typically, companies come in by themselves or in a technology bubble, like a university or some other support structure. They get no assistance, however, in setting up a business. They’re not covered on the legal side or in creating a demand in the marketplace. Our goal is to give them a very supportive hand to grow and expand and to attract them to southern Nevada and make our area better,” Conine says.

The five-person team at UARRC aims to bring a thriving unmanned workforce to southern Nevada.

The group is in the process of presenting its plans for Cashman Center to the Las Vegas Convention and Business Authority, which owns and manages the site. The 51s baseball team’s lease there runs through 2022. The company would share the facility with the team, which of course only uses it during baseball season, before taking over completely. The ball field would be covered with netted area for outdoor flight testing. If the plan gets rejected for some reason (they do not think it will), UARRC will find another site in or around the Las Vegas area. The enclosed spaces would house offices.

They hope to be up and running, with clients in place, by sometime in 2017.

In the meantime, UARRC has been talking to single investors, investment groups and prospective tenant companies.

“One of our big things right now is to encourage people to reach out to us,” says Conine.

Prospective clients can find a form on the group’s website, www. uarrc.com, which they can use to identify their company and describe their ideas. The group wants to hear from anybody in the commercial robotics community, whether they are involved with driverless cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, search and

rescue, artificial intelligence, or any other projects.

While UARRC cannot make any firm deals until they reach an agreement with the landlords at the Las Vegas Convention and Business Authority, to date they have talked with 30 potential companies. They have received feelers from groups ranging in diversity from existing developers of prototypes to high school students from Portland, Oregon.

The group is looking for three different characteristics.

“One, that the idea is disruptive and world changing. They’re the only people doing it, and they have a patent. They are the only people who know how to do this thing. It’s the quality of the idea,” Conine says.

Second, they are looking at the quality of the people themselves, who may be presenting an idea that is not fleshed out. The proposers, however, may show the drive, determination, skill and “a little bit of craziness,” as Conine says, to convince UARRC they have what it takes to succeed.

Third, such projects have to be financially viable. They ultimately have to be accepted within the marketplace.

“When we find the right people with the right idea ... that’s the type of company we’re looking for.”

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A Flood of Information CRASAR Summer Institute Focuses on Data Dissemination in Disasters

By Barbara Levorson

When a natural disaster strikes a community, the effects are both immediate and long term. Every year, over 1 million people are killed worldwide in natural disasters and 2.5 million are disabled or displaced from their homes. It may take a community 20 to 30 years to fully recover, and globally this represents billions of dollars of economic losses.

If emergency response agencies could improve their response rate by just one day, it is estimated the overall recovery in the community can be reduced by 1,000 days or nearly three years. The ability to restore essential services such as water, electricity, hospitals and roads is directly linked to faster long-term recovery in the community. The application of UAVs in disaster scenarios is proving invaluable to this timely response.

One such researcher in this field is Dr. Robin Murphy, director of the Center for Robot-Assisted Search and Rescue (CRASAR) and founder of Roboticists Without Borders at Texas A&M University.

She was a sponsor and organizer of the Summer Institute held there in July 2015. Since 2009, this annual event has brought together multiple disaster response agencies and researchers to undertake realistic exercises to determine their technical readiness in the three Rs: response, recovery and restoration.

“This event is an opportunity to evaluate current technology,” says Murphy. “The technology may be too complex or not accurate enough.

Or it may have interesting applications, and we can evaluate where it needs improvements, for instance, in 20

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The flight crew that tested an AR180 drone in Summer Institute disaster scenarios.

mobility or interface or documentation. The goal of our experimentation method is to be able to assess if the technology is mission ready.”

This year, the Summer Institute focused on flooding and was held after the devastating Memorial Day floods in Texas and Oklahoma, so research teams were already thinking about the technology needs in flood scenarios.

“Floods demand a different response than other types of disasters,” says Murphy. “We are dealing with swift water conditions, which can damage infrastructure such as bridges and also demand a largescale missing persons search over inaccessible areas. Standing water can hamper the assessment and restoration of power grids.”

Unmanned surface vehicles and underwater vehicles are able to make assessments about the structural integrity of bridges or the state of levees.

TURNING DATA INTO DECISIONS But the real challenge is not the unmanned system; it is the tremendous amount of data that is produced and the distribution of the right data to the right experts at the right time.

“A single 20-minute UAV flight at the Memorial Day floods produced over 800 images, totaling 1.7 gigbytes of data,” Murphy says.

At the Oso, Washington, flood in 2014, in just seven hours UAS collected high-resolution data that

TESTING, TESTING

An example of how an app would display where data have been collected over time during a distaster.

otherwise would have taken two to three days to collect by satellite.

While these data are invaluable to saving lives and property, they can overwhelm the people and agencies trying to sort through the volumes to find relevant elements.

“A major finding of the Summer Institute was the realization that while state agencies are using UAVs, they can’t process all the imagery coming in,” says Murphy. “Missing persons is a key example. Each image has to be viewed manually for signs of survivors, clothing, or debris that indicate a house or car or a person was swept to this location.”

The priority challenge is managing what she calls the “data-to-decision chain.” Software applications such as computer vision systems and machine learning software are able to process hundreds of images and reliably recognize if debris piles could contain a victim.

Photos: CRASAR.

Some of this software has been developed by students through the National Science Foundation’s Computing for Disasters Research Experiences for Undergraduates.

“The software can classify imagery from small UAVs and identify debris and signs of missing persons,” says Murphy. “We aren’t expecting the computer vision sys-

tem to be perfect, but to be perfect at triaging. We want it to reliably say ‘yes,’ ‘no,’ or ‘a human needs to look at this image,’” says Murphy.

This can save hours or days and, ultimately, lives.

The dissemination of the data to the relevant response agencies also presents a challenge. In a flood situation, there could be up to 28 different agencies involved, including transportation and public works, firefighting, search-and-rescue teams, health and medical services, hazardous materials, energy, as well as structural, geospatial, and hydrological engineers, wildlife and livestock management, and insurance agencies. Each of these stakeholders has their own procedures and information requirements.

Murphy says, “In the past, they didn’t have data, so data sharing was not a problem. Now we must work out timely and effective distribution mechanisms that also protect personal identification and confidentiality.”

Another challenge is UAS are not currently deployed consistently in disasters and have been deployed only eight times for floods worldwide.

“The various agencies involved don’t necessarily own their devices, and they are uncertain about the

best practices in using them,” says Murphy.

If the agency or partner owns a UAS, it can be on site in about four hours. Otherwise it may take over six days, arriving too late to be used within the critical first few hours.

Despite this, Murphy is optimistic about the future of unmanned systems for disaster response.

“The future is in computer vision and machine learning,” she says. “We have been working for several years with University of California Berkeley and University of Maryland on handling imagery.

They have created techniques that allow a machine learning algorithm to learn what to look for with just a few samples.”

Ultimately, UAS may be used every day for preventative use to monitor wetlands and buildings or do pipeline inspections.

“We are working to have tools on hand that can be adapted for the disaster in minutes and then sort through hundreds of images,” says Murphy. “If we can reduce our emergency response by just one day, essential services are restored much sooner, and the community is functioning much sooner. That’s a game changer.”

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DEEPSECRETS

The Echo Ranger is deployed to image the World War II aircraft carrier USS Independence, intentionally sunk offshore California in 1951.

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UUVs Uncover Countless Shipwrecks Worldwide in Fraction of the Time

By Karen Aho

More than three million shipwrecks lie on the ocean floors. To archeologists, this is history lost: clues into millennia of trade, battle and shipbuilding all trapped by the inhospitable reach of the sea.

With only 5 percent of the ocean explored, scientists have had better luck surveying Mars.

The Mediterranean Sea alone holds some 300,000 shipwrecks, and marine archaeologist Brendan Foley, of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, would like to map them all. Realistically, that could take centuries. So Foley will settle for a few hundred, a number he says could provide critical information about the movements of the first human civilizations.

Photos: The Boeing Co.

Until a decade or two ago, even this endeavor would have been dismissed as fantasy. The Mediterranean is 1 million square miles, with an average depth of 1,500 meters.

Divers can safely work only down to about 50 meters.

Remotely operated vehicles and human operated vehicles can drop that deep and send high-resolution images up in real time, but they do so at an expense that would make NASA cringe. An ROV, the less cumbersome and dangerous of the two, must be tethered to a large ship, and that ship must have a dynamic positioning system, a cost to researchers of up to $100,000 a day.

The going is slow, and the ROV is

too unstable to stitch together accurate data maps.

ers. The ships themselves, made of wood, no longer remain.

But Foley has raised millions of dollars and undertaken several missions. His mission is no pipe dream, because he’s using autonomous underwater vehicles.

These athorma were likely from the fourth century B.C. and were spread on a flat, silty seafloor 70 meters below the surface, “deeper than is feasible to explore with scuba equipment,” Foley reported in the journal Hesperia.

Marine archaeology is undergoing a major shift thanks to the evolution of submersible AUVs, battery-powered torpedoes that can go deep, stay down long and maintain steady altitude to return, in a matter of hours, both full-scale 3-D site maps and photos detailed enough to identify small clay pots that have been on the ocean floor for 5,000 years.

“This brings 98 percent of the world’s ocean floor within reach,” Foley writes at the Woods Hole site.

By using a combination of AUVs and ROVs, he explains, archaeologists will be able to survey the sea floor to depths of 6,000 meters.

Steeped in History

Ten years ago, an interdisciplinary team set out to see just what a robotic marine archaeologist could do.

Oceanographers in Greece had found a scattering of clay pots off the coast of Chios, a Greek island in the Aegean Sea, and archaeologists had confirmed the site’s importance.

Ancient shipwrecks are made up of athorma, clay pots with handles that were used as shipping contain-

A team from Woods Hole brought over its SeaBed AUV, developed by one of its own scientists, Hanumant Singh, and budgeted eight days to prep, program and survey the 1,350-square meter site.

It took three days.

The result: a photomosaic made from more than 7,000 high-resolution digital images; a bathymetric map of the site using data collected by multi-beam sonar and navigation sensors; and information gleaned from onboard environmental sensors measuring water temperature, salinity, aromatic hydrocarbons, concentrations of dissolved organic matter, and chlorophyll levels.

SeaBED, a 440-pound, doublehulled AUV, had completed four passes, ranging from 1 1/2 to three hours apiece, all within 24 hours.

With each, it swam multiple grid patterns over the wreck site, maintaining a uniform altitude 2.5 meters above the seafloor. It propelled itself at 0.39 knots, snapped photos every three seconds with a synchronized strobe light and continuously collected multibeam sonar data.

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The Echo Ranger used a CodaOctopus Echoscope to take 3-D sonar images of the wreck.

The shipwreck, confirmed as occurring sometime between 350 B.C. and 330 B.C., remained undisturbed, and archaeologists were freed from the mundane and potentially dangerous tasks of diving and mapping. Because the two-meterlong AUV could be launched from a small fishing boat, future charter vessel costs could be reduced to $10,000 to $20,000 a day.

It’s this efficiency that could allow marine archaeologists to survey dozens of shipwrecks in a single field season to create a statistical database massive big enough to spit out a big-picture view of how and why civilizations spread across the Mediterranean region and into what is now Europe.

“Ships were the way that people communicated and moved about the ancient world,” Foley told Nature magazine. “So if we can find these ancient wrecks, we get a much clearer view of the very dim past.”

Analyzing Wrecks

Fast forward a decade to the spring of 2015, when the National Oce24

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anic and Atmospheric Association got its first comprehensive look into how AUVs can help analyze shipwrecks.

NOAA is tasked with surveying and preserving shipwrecks in federal marine sanctuaries, and there are hundreds in the waters off San Francisco alone. The USS Independence may be one of the area’s deepest, at 800 meters.

Launched from New Jersey in 1942, the 623-foot light aircraft carrier played a critical role in the Pacific naval offensive during WWII. In 1946, it was part of a target fleet in the Bikini Atoll atomic bomb tests, and it sustained damage in underwater and aerial blasts.

The U.S. Navy towed it to sea and scuttled it in 1951, afraid it would sink at its mooring. Its engineering, and its subsequent damage, were not well documented, according to NOAA. Sixty-four years later, after narrowing its location with ship side-scan sonar, NOAA sent in the Boeing Echo Ranger, an AUV it had equipped with Coda Octopus

Echoscope 3-D sonar.

The Echo Ranger is big — 18 feet long and 12,000 pounds — and the scientists were using a small research vessel. So they lowered it by a crane from land, towed it a few miles and released it a safe distance from shore. The AUV swam 30 miles to the wreck location, then dove down to carry out its mission: eight hours of crisscrossing at three knots to snap millions of data points. It then swam back to its meetup point with the ship offshore.

The entire operation took 34 hours.

The 3-D, color-coded image showed the ship upright, with a slight starboard list, but remarkably intact, “as if ready to launch its planes,” says mission leader James Delgado, the maritime heritage director for NOAA’s Office of National Marine Sanctuaries.

The Echo Ranger can dive to 3,000 meters and operate for 28 hours before surfacing to be recharged. Its successor, the Echo Seeker, due out next year, can run for 72 hours at 6,000 meters, says

Echo Ranger dove 3,000 feet into the Pacific Ocean on a joint, multi-day mission with NOAA.

Robert Schwemmer, NOAA’s West Coast Regional Maritime Heritage Coordinator.

“It allows us to explore parts of the ocean that we’ve ever explored before,” he says.

ROVs can maneuver into spaces later and provide instant visual feedback through the tethered line. But they lack the mobility to survey large areas and the stability to provide detailed outlines.

“An autonomous vehicle is programmed so precisely, you get the best information,” Schwemmer says. “And it can go for hours and hours. Whereas if you’re using an ROV, a pilot has got to drive that.”

Photos: CodaOctopus, The Boeing Co.

In October, Schwemmer’s team planned to use the smaller, nimbler Iver2, a 5.8-inch-wide AUV made by OceanServer that can be launched by hand from a small ship.

“It’s got a lot of horsepower,” Schwemmer says. “It’s also small enough that I can get into tighter places.”

In 1944, the Independence helped sink a critical Japanese tar-

get: Musashi, the largest and most technologically advanced battleship ever constructed. Two months before NOAA scanned the Independence, Microsoft cofounder and philanthropist Paul Allen successfully completed an eight-year search for Musashi, and he ultimately located it using an AUV. His team had used historical and geographic records to narrow a search area to 360 square nautical miles. Then it sent in a Bluefin 12, manufactured by Bluefin Robotics, to sweep the underwater volcanic ridgelines with sonar.

Each dive lasted 24 hours. At five knots, Bluefin could cover up to 150 square miles, according to National Geographic. On the third run, the AUV spotted the 73,000ton battleship resting on the seabed at 1,200 meters.

In the Arctic last summer, a Canadian consortium used two AUVs — OceanServer’s Iver3 and the Arctic Explorer from British Columbia’s International Submarine Engineering Ltd. — in its search for the Franklin Expedition, whose two

ships went missing in 1845 trying to chart the Northwest Passage. (It was an ROV, searching a separate area, that came across the wreckage.)

AUVs have also discovering shipwrecks in the course of their other work.

Earlier this year, the Dutch engineering data services firm Fugro was using a deep-tow in search of the missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 when it detected a cluster of bright reflections on the seafloor.

It dispatched its deep-sea AUV, the Echo Surveyor VII, which is rated to 3,000 meters, to get a highresolution sonar scan. The wreckage, resting on the southern Indian Ocean bed at 3,900 meters, was identified as the remains of a 19th century cargo ship.

Last year, California researchers were using an AUV to study earthquake faults when they discovered a sunken barge off Monterey Bay. The Umpqua II had run aground in 1982 and been scuttled in deep water. It had rested at a depth of 1,700 meters undetected, until that AUV came along mapping the seafloor.  MISSION CRITICAL

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ABOVE AND BEYOND efforts to determine the extent of the damage and provide intelligence on the most effective approach to distributing relief.

real-time data. As the first company to be approved to operate UAVs commercially in Australia, Heliwest was primarily a manned helicopter carrier and flight school until two years ago when it also began flying UAVs. Its five-man emergency response department regularly works in disaster relief and crises. X-craft, a research and development company primarily focused on blue water fisheries in the South Pacific, develops its own UAVs as well as using other commercial craft in its operations.

The company’s nine pilots respond to search and rescue and rural fire emergencies in New Zealand.

With the leadership of Perth, Australia’s Heliwest Group, joined

by Auckland, New Zealand’s X-craft Enterprises, a team of pilots with UAVs arrived in Vanuatu to conduct the reconnaissance and gather

Before the team could get started, Heliwest’s Luke Aspinall, manager of special operations, had to negotiate sensitive conflicts due to concerns from manned operations about sharing airspace.

Drone Companies Come to Aid After Cyclone Pam

By Gaea L. Honeycutt

Cyclone Pam ravaged the idyllic 65-island nation of Vanuatu in March 2015. Facing a Category 5 storm, the buildings and natural beauty of one of the poorest countries in the region was no match for the 155 mph winds, rain and waves that descended upon it. Directed by the World Bank, teams were sent into Vanuatu ahead of most relief 26

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END USERS Heliwest flew a Lockheed Martin Indago and a modified DJI Phantom 2 Vision+ over the damage from Cyclone Pam.

“There wasn’t a standard operating system in Vanuatu, so we had to establish a standard for operating UAVs and get it approved.”

Aspinall considers those initial meetings during the first 24 hours to be key the success of the mission, crediting Heliwest’s background in manned aviation with providing the insight to resolve the conflicts.

“If the time isn’t spent safely deconflicting with the other aircraft out there, with the guys out there saving lives, then you’re just getting in the way.”

Armed with cell and satellite phones to regularly communicate with air traffic control, the team struck out to survey dozens of sites across more than 10 islands, conducting small, surgical missions over more than 2,500 acres of coverage.

“Everything was done by the book and everything flowed really nicely. It’s a good example of how manned and unmanned aircraft can operate together,” says X-craft CEO Philip Solaris.

Photo: Heliwest Group, X-craft.

Machines on a Mission

Focused on maintaining the smallest logistical footprint possible, Heliwest used Lockheed Martin’s Indago quadcopter, a UAV that easily fits into a backpack and flies up to 1.25 miles in any direction. When conventional transportation was unavailable, the Heliwest pilots took all-terrain vehicles to remote sites, placing the easy-to-carry cases in backpacks on the ATVs. Unfolding to 32-inches-by-32-inches in flight mode, the UAVs flew for 45 minutes per trip, but were easy to redeploy with a switch of battery packs. Payloads included thermal infrared and traditional photographic cameras,

X-craft’s Align 690L Multicopter gathered imagery, flying in conditions that grounded manned aircraft.

designed to work between 10 and 500 feet above the ground.

Likewise, X-craft flew Align’s 690L Multicopter, a 36-inch hexacopter that also folds for compact carrying. The UAV flies for up to 17 minutes at 700 meters on the manufacturer’s battery, but can go for longer with the lithium polymer batteries used for the mission. The payload included 3-D image catcher and reconnaissance cameras and X-craft’s modifications to autopilot and GPS systems.

The UAVs had to endure particularly humid conditions, with high winds of up to 40 knots, low cloud cover and frequent precipitation — conditions that grounded conventional aircraft. Early in the mission, part of the team was stranded for two days due to lack of availability of transportation between islands.

Some were able to rent a small helicopter, which also allowed the mission to expand to other islands.

Despite the weather, transportation challenges and complications caused by the devastation, the aircraft averaged six to eight flights per day, with as many as 10 some days.

Making a Difference

In just under two weeks, the team was able to gather and transmit data on Cyclone Pam and the urgent needs of Vanuatu’s people. Wherever they traveled, the team encountered souls who were simply grateful to be alive.

“Having your entire lives and properties destroyed, you’d expect them to be sad,” says Aspinall. “But they were really supportive and happy, and [they] offered what little they had.”

“We’d gone to places where there hadn’t been any relief,” Solaris said. “For example, people in one village had gathered in the only remaining concrete building and had held their children above their heads because the water had risen so high.”

As the team was at the airport about to depart, Aspinall was able to witness the result of their efforts.

“One of the USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] planes arrived, and they were taking supplies to one of the islands. They knew what to bring because of the surveying we’d done.”

To see a video of X-craft’s Vanuatu mission, scan this QR code with your smartphone.

MISSION CRITICAL

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