OpenOcean.software is an NSF Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems project focused on creating a robust and scalable marine robotics open-source ecosystem. The project aims to integrate and standardize several existing open-source software frameworks, but is also designed with extensibility in mind, allowing for the incorporation of additional projects while addressing critical gaps in quality assurance. Key objectives include designing tools for project discovery and testing, developing a peer-reviewed pipeline to ensure high-quality software contributions, and documenting best practices based on community-driven standards.

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This effort serves marine roboticists and oceanographers who need to develop more capable [and more affordable, easier to use] systems to better collect oceanographic data, defend our national interests, or create and maintain ocean technology such as wind energy.

The status quo of fragmented open source robotics projects fails due to small communities with siloed development efforts, causing continual redevelopment of related efforts (reinventing the wheel), and slow adoption of robotics by scientists.

We will establish a managing organization for supporting numerous peer reviewed marine robotics projects, starting with three from the PI organizations, to deliver access to open source projects, documentation, and training for running marine robots, and collecting reliable and trusted data with them with governance that includes a peer review process for accepting new projects, and guidance for security and approved open source licenses.

We will grow the community through participation at existing targeted conferences and technical workshops (such as IEEE OCEANS, IEEE AUV, ICRA, MOOS-DAWG), partnership with new funded projects that include the underlying projects. We will achieve broader impacts by directly improving the utility of marine robotics for science.

We will measure success by increased adoption of programs in funded efforts and citations of our projects in academic journals and conferences, and we will sustain the ecosystem with a combination of consulting or training revenue, ongoing governmental funding, and corporate consortia.