Modelling and simulation underpin complex systems design. It is a prerequisite for conducting technology development, incorporating innovation and developing autonomous systems. In the marine domain, monitoring solutions are increasing in complexity; integrating artificial intelligence, emerging decision support, autonomous navigation and multi-vessel sensing to achieve mission objectives within an evolving maritime regulatory environment.
Yet, the system development lifecycle must also accelerate to maintain pace with technology in order to maintain a competitive advantage. Facilitating an accelerated development cycle requires the ability to rapidly design, build and test, which leads to the requirement for instrumented test ranges underpinned by a marine synthetic environment.
Sustaining a marine synthetic environment for the purposes of technology maturation is expensive. However, a marine synthetic environment has significant multi-use potential, from replaying coral observation transects with high resolution photogrammetry overlays, to understanding safety implications during mission planning, to facilitating semi-real training in a virtual world. These additional use cases expand the economic potential and consequently sustainability of establishing and maintaining a marine synthetic environment for technology maturation. In this presentation, I will discuss some of the practical considerations in establishing a marine synthetic environment and associated ecosystem for integrated autonomous systems technology maturation.