13 Who’s Minding the Planet? SURFACE WATER At the same time, the cost of technology we need for navigation and for situational awareness has come down and also shrunk in physical form factor. It’s much easier for us to integrate everything into vehicles now. Kevin: GPS has definitely come a long way since the early days of these vehicles.Years ago, GPS used to be based on “selective availability”. In other words, your position wasn't quite as accurate, depending on the day, time, week and month, as it is today. It was a restriction on civilian devices by the military – that has since been lifted. Improved GPS accuracy – and the associated metadata – is probably the number one reason ASVs especially are becoming more and more popular today. Depending on the GPS system installed, you can expect sub-meter – even millimeter level– location data to geo-reference water quality and quantity measurements taken on autonomous vehicles. Battery technology, software advancements, and improvements to communication systems with the vehicles have all evolved rapidly as well. The list goes on and on.This progress directly translates to the ability for us to make affordable and useful autonomous vessels for the environmental monitoring. People are often skeptical about automated solutions, whether that's a drone delivering packages, a self- driving car, or in this case, an automated vehicle in water.What would you say to skeptics? Geoff: Like all technology, people are always skeptical in the beginning.The one truth here is that automation is the future. Surveyors are certainly the early adopters, however these types of vehicles will only expand into the shipping industry, and eventually into recreational boats. The question with any nascent technology is what can companies do to make it intuitive and safe to use? Right now, surveyors are used to having a driver.They're used to having a pilot operating their vehicle or boat with full situational awareness. With autonomous technology, you have to give that up.There is no boat driver.That’s the whole point.These vehicles do that work for you, while someone else monitors and validates the data collected. And even then our systems are getting better and better at quality checking the data on their own. We engineer these vehicles to be as safe and intuitive as possible by adding in a bunch of fail-safes. If you think about an aerial drone, you can only fly so high. If there's an air space restriction, the vehicles often prevent themselves from flying into it. These are the types of fail-safes they use in the air, and we have similar fail-safes for water. For example, if the water becomes too shallow to operate, the vehicle will stop. If you create a geographical boundaries for operation and something goes wrong and a vehicle exits the area, it will stop.And it won't just stop – it will inform you that its path deviated from what was expected. It’s kind of funny because people assume automated vehicles aren’t as safe as traditional methods to collect this type of data, but it's actually safer. KEVIN SIMPSON GEOFF DOUGLASS 24 Years 9 Years ABOUT ABOUT EXPERIENCE EXPERIENCE COMPANY COMPANY TITLE TITLE Director of Systems Engineering Product Development Manager TM Kevin Simpson is the Director of Systems Engineering at Xylem and has twenty four years of experience developing, integrating, and maintaining water monitoring instrumentation. He is responsible for exploring cutting- edge technology and its application in solving the world’s most challenging water issues. Kevin holds a B.S. in Biological Sciences & Business Management from North Carolina State University. Geoff Douglass is the Product Development Manager at SeaRobotics, a company that specializes in autonomous vehicles. For the past seven years, he has been chiefly responsible for all vehicle development. Prior to joining the company, he worked as a Design Engineer developing similar autonomous systems for the Office of Naval Research. Geoff holds a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Northeastern University.