IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - March/April 2020 - 110

Special Section on Implementable Humanitarian Technology

Figure 2. Example of oil spill and tsunami detection.

the AUV detected the plane wreckage, while
cameras on the AUVs confirmed that the wreckage was that of AirFrance Flight 447.10
Recently, pressure sensors have been deployed for early tsunami detection in the Indonesian
archipelago. In this application, pressure sensors are deployed on the seafloor about a mile
deep and 60 miles from land. Whenever a pressure
sensor detects a tsunami wave, it transmits an
underwater acoustic signal that is propagated
among the underwater nodes until it reaches the
node connected to the monitoring center through
a cable. The monitoring center then issues an alert
for the population. This straightforward architecture has the potential to save many lives. Earlier
tsunami detection and alerts offer people more
time to react, since a tsunami can reach shore in
the Indonesian archipelago area in only 30 min.
The three humanitarian applications discussed above use a simple architecture for underwater monitoring. In fact, most of the architectures
are limited to the deployment of a few underwater
sensor nodes. This is due to the high cost and limited technology. However, researchers are devoting efforts in technological advancement toward
large-scale autonomous underwater monitoring
applications. These applications will only be possible with an ocean of things (or the IoUTs).11

IoUTs FOR HUMANITARIAN
APPLICATIONS
As discussed in the section "Architectures,"
current underwater humanitarian applications
use limited underwater sensor network architectures. One of the big challenges in this field is
the development of the IoUTs, which would

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enable large-scale and autonomous data collection from aquatic environments, such as for oil
spills and early tsunami detection, as shown in
Figure 2. In this regard, the DARPA's Strategic
Technology Office has created an Ocean of
Things funding program with an expected total
award value of $37 000 000. This program facilitates the development of floats and analytical
techniques to empower ocean sensing at large
scales and high resolution.
In terms of hardware, the Ocean of Things program is designed to develop floats for periodic
sensing of local ocean properties. The floats must
be capable of identifying and collecting data from
events of interest while dealing with communication and energy constraints. Moreover, it should
be able to maximize its performance in terms of
sampling rates, motion control, biofouling reduction, and power control. In terms of software, the
goal of the program is to develop data analytics
techniques to process float data. In addition to
processing and visualization, the techniques will
be able to initiate a track report and discriminate
between multiple targets using multimode detections, identify novel signatures, new associations
in data, and new mission products available from
the Ocean of Things dataset.
In the following, we discuss other challenges
that should be addressed to develop IoUTs for
underwater humanitarian applications, which
are summarized in Table 2.

Connectivity
To ensure connectivity among underwater
sensor networks is a daunting problem. UWSN
applications rely on the sparse deployments of
underwater sensor nodes. Moreover, underwater

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IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - March/April 2020

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