An Intelligent Adaptable Monitoring Package. Final Report
The “Intelligent Adaptable Monitoring Package” project was a four-year effort that demonstrated the feasibility of integrated sensing packages at tidal and wave energy sites. Such integration is generally required by the breadth of sensors required to understand environmental effects at marine energy sites and the operational difficulty of deploying, maintaining, and recovering such sensors. Over the course of the project, the Adaptable Monitoring Package (AMP) was deployed in multiple settings, each corresponding to a project budget period: - Budget Period 1: Demonstration of cabled deployment at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory’s Marine Science Laboratory. The deployment highlighted AMP hardware endurance over a 4-month deployment in a tidally-dominated environment and laid the groundwork for machine learning algorithms to detect and classify targets present in active sonar data. - Budget Period 2: Demonstration of an autonomous deployment at PacWave South off the coast of Newport, Oregon. The deployment highlighted the stability of AMP hardware and software, with the autonomous package collecting data on a duty cycle over a 1.5-month deployment. - Budget Period 3: Demonstration of an autonomous deployment powered by a wave energy converter at the U.S. Navy’s Wave Energy Test Site. The deployment highlighted the potential of wave energy to power ocean observatories and led to the development of machine learning algorithms to detect and classify targets in optical camera data. In aggregate, this project’s greatest success was demonstrating the AMP’s flexibility in a range of deployment scenarios. Each budget period represented a “first of a kind” demonstration of integrated instrumentation – cabled AMP, autonomous AMP, wave-energy powered AMP – and each deployment helped to identify and set goals for the next. Further, despite the exploratory nature of these deployments, each one achieved high system up-time and proved that flexible integration of multiple sensors in a single package represents a viable strategy for marine energy environmental monitoring. The key lessons learned from the project are: - Without continuous power, either from a shore cable or in situ source, many of the benefits of integration are lost (If continuous power is not available, the ability to detect rare events is lost, as is the ability to minimize the risk of behavioral changes through adaptive sensing. However, even on a duty cycle, there is still value in being able to acquire synchronous data from multiple sensors.); and - Observations from a moving platform present substantially greater data processing challenges than those from stationary platforms. Finally, these deployments also demonstrate an important truth: successful integration alone does not guarantee that relevant data are collected. To grow the knowledge base about environmental interactions with marine energy converters, integrated systems, like the AMP, need to include the right sensor mix and connect the data pipelines to effective processing algorithms. These deployments establish a strong foundation for future collaborations with the environmental research community: not only to understand the environmental effects of marine energy, but also to improve our general ability to study life in the sea.