Greensea Launches OPENSEA Edge

Designed for military use but now available commercially, OPENSEA Edge is designed to be a modular edge computing module with perception support for autonomous underwater robots based on Greensea’s OPENSEA open architecture software platform, advancing ocean robotics into the next generation.

Greensea launched its latest product which the company says promises to bring true autonomy to ocean robotics.

Based on Greensea’s open architecture platform OPENSEA, OPENSEA Edge offers the next level of operator capability. While OPENSEA provides the software capabilities of navigation, control, autonomy, perception, and long-range communications, OPENSEA Edge provides a modular, hardware agnostic processing platform, that converts a traditional ROV into one with autonomy, AI, vehicle perception and tetherless, over-the-horizon, communication and control. Essentially, it is a convenient add-on package to deliver integrated edge processing and perception system integration to a traditional ROV.

“I founded Greensea to develop technology that would improve the working relationship between operators and vehicles. OPENSEA Edge is the embodiment of that effort," said Greensea founder and CEO Ben Kinnaman. "OPENSEA Edge delivers an edge-processing solution for ocean vehicles with control, autonomy, perception, and sea-floor-to-over-the-horizon communications. With OPENSEA Edge, Greensea is leading the way towards subsea robot residency and extended reach."

OPENSEA Edge uses parallel NVIDIA processors to handle sonar and video perception feeds while providing autonomy, communications, and task management for the robot. This platform puts a tremendous amount of processing power at the edge, right on the robot, where it can work directly with sensor data and make decisions for the vehicle. OPENSEA’s Safe C2 software package for low bandwidth and high latency communications links provides a seafloor to over-the-horizon communications solution for operators supervising the robot. With the open architecture framework of OPENSEA and available processing space, developers can install their own autonomy and perception-handling software, including AI/ML libraries.

Through collaboration with other subsea technology leaders, OPENSEA Edge has been able to deliver a complete solution. One example is Greensea's collaboration with Seebyte, a specialist in Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) technology. The ATR system uses fast, machine learning techniques to detect and classify targets from forward looking sonar data. Any ROV equipped with OPENSEA Edge can now identify targets, based on an extensive and growing internal library of past experiences.

Image courtesy Greensea