As biological life sprang to land from sea, ocean engineers and other scientists hope to soon push artificial life in the return direction.rnOcean scientists and engineers from around the globe spoke in Orlando in mid-February at AUVSI's 2009 Unmanned Maritime Systems Technology Review, a four-day conference sponsored by the U.S. Navy that examined advances in platform development, data fusion, communications and navigations technology and the operation of multi-vehicle systems with distributed intelligence.rn"There is a paradigm shift from platform-centric [systems] toward distributed autonomous sensing and surveillance" in the maritime environment, said Henrik Schmidt, a professor of mechanical and ocean engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.rnAs with other areas of unmanned systems development, buyers want systems using cheaper-and in some cases disposable-platforms and sensors that work autonomously in a "network-centric" manner. Moreover, engineers must overcome greater technological barriers as vehicles and sensors move beneath the sea surface, requiring communication among network nodes with many orders of magnitude less bandwidth capacity than equivalent networks on land and in air.
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