open source oceans

Oceanography's dependence on expensive, proprietary robots and sensors to measure the ocean and the bespoke manufacturers who sell and support them is a barrier to being able to lower the cost of collecting data and being able to scale it up.  The following examples have happened in Oceanography:

Company failures: Companies have gone out of business, ceasing the ability to support or refurbish their products, leaving customers with proprietary products with no chance for support. [1] 
Forced obsolescence: For various reasons companies will cease support of older products, leaving customers with proprietary products with no chance for support [2].  In some cases these might be viable business decisions, but they can damage the long term investment the Oceanographic community made in their products [3].
Aquisition and mergers: Most cutting edge robots and sensors come from smaller companies who are often purchased by larger companies.  This can create confusion of who supports what after a purchase or merger and even as simple as complete serial number confusion.  [4]
Proprietary Data Formats: In addition to proprietary hardware and software companies will use proprietary data formats further locking people into buying, upgrading and supporting their proprietary software to unlock the data formats. [5]. These formats can restrict API's making it unnecessarily difficult for the Oceanographic community to create better software.[6][7]
Cost and Complexity: There is no low cost CTD option, so the open source community made one.  [8]

In all these examples, science suffers.  Open Source Oceans is a Public Benefit Corporation dedicated to helping to design, build and support an open source version of every robot and sensor that the Oceanographic Community.  We have already started development on an open source glider called SeaFlight.   

Who

John Reine: Electrical Engineer who raised internal money at WHOI for designing and building the SeaFlight Glider.  

What

Open Source Oceans will design and build a family of Robots and Sensors for the Oceanographic communities around the world.  

Robots:
Underwater glider 
Autonomous solar/electric boat (to recover + deploy ocean glider)
Long Range AUV
Autonomous solar/electric sailboat
Sensors:
CTD
pCO2
Passive acoustic array

Where:

The PBC will be located in Falmouth, MA, where the original Slocum Glider was created by working with WHOI scientists and Engineers, and we will work with Scientists, Engineers, Technicians and students at WHOI and around the world to design, build and test this family of sea going robots.  

Footnotes:

  1. Hobi Labs goes out of business
  2. AML Oceanographic ends general support including service, technical support, calibration, and repair of legacy fixed-sensor instrumentation
  3. In early 2015 Liquid Robotics announced end of sale of the Wave Glider SV2, first introduced in 2008.
  4. SBE, Satlantic, WET Labs and Sea-Bird Scientific: how to match sensors to the correct manufacturer
  5. Disrupting data sharing for a healthier ocean
  6. Teledyne RDI's proprietary WVS format and the open source workaround
  7. ADCP VMDAS proprietary format and the open source workaround: UHDAS
  8. Cost and complexity of a CTD impedes the progress of researchers