Brief bio

João Tasso de Figueiredo Borges de Sousa is with ECE Department, Porto University and the head of the Underwater Systems and Technologies Laboratory – LSTS (https://www.lsts.pt/). He holds a PhD and a MSc in ECE, both awarded by Porto University. His research interests include multi-domain unmanned vehicles, planning/execution control for networked vehicle systems, and applications to the ocean sciences, security, and defense. He received the BES Innovation National Award in 2006, an outstanding teaching award from Porto University in 2008, and the IEEE Ocean Engineering Society mid-career Rising Star award in 2018. He is the chair of the Swedish Marine Robotics Center Advisory Board, a member of the NATO MUS Innovation Advisory Board, and a member of SFI-Ocean Advisory Board. He was the chief scientist for the 2018 Schmidt Ocean Institute cruise Exploring Fronts with Multiple Robots. He was the chair of the 2013 IFAC Navigation, Guidance and Control Workshop and of the 2018 IEEE OES AUV Symposium. He was a co-chair of the Oceans 2021 San Diego Porto Conference. He has been co-organizing, since 2010, the REP(MUS) large-scale exercise in cooperation with the PO Navy, CMRE, and MUS-NATO. He is an Associate Editor of the IEEE Journal of Oceanic Engineering and has authored over 400 publications, including 50 journal papers.

TALK TITLE

Maritime unmanned vehicles: is there a law of exponentials?

ABSTRACT

In 2001 Ray Kurzweil, an American computer scientist, author, inventor, and futurist, observed that this is an age of exponential technological change. Today, we are witnessing exponential growth in several fields. This is the case with the aerial and maritime drone market, according to several reputed publications.
Over the last 3 decades, the field of maritime unmanned vehicles has had a slow evolution. But this is changing significantly in part because of a unique combination of a strong market pull – coming mainly from the oil, gas, and wind farms industries, as well as from security and defense, and science – and an exponential technological push – coming mainly from advances in computation, artificial intelligence, miniaturization, and energy storage. 
This paper discusses growth perspectives and associated challenges in the field of maritime unmanned systems. First, a few trends in operations, operational experimentation and evaluation, trans-national access to robotic infrastructures, and Digital Ocean concepts are presented. This provides the background against which the impact on current and future developments will be discussed. This impact is discussed first from the perspective of technological challenges, ranging from command-and-control hierarchies to concepts of systems of systems. The discussion is then focused on key enabling theories and technologies ranging from models of computation for systems with dynamic structures, with special emphasis on cyber-physical systems, to new requirements for vehicle design, including design for interactions, and to layered command and control architectures – to cope with future systems of systems, which may include hundreds, if not thousands of assets. Finally, a few questions about the development of novel theories and technologies are posed as the conclusions.