POSE: Phase I: Enabling an Open-Source Ecosystem for Marine Robotics

This Pathways to Enable Open-Source Ecosystems (POSE) project improves the accessibility and functionality of tools and software in the field of marine robotics. Marine environments present unique challenges due to their vastness, extreme conditions, and limitations in the ability to use technologies such as global positioning systems (GPS) and wireless communication that often facilitate terrestrial and space exploration. This project seeks to establish an open-source ecosystem tailored to marine robotics to address these challenges. The ecosystem provides a robust platform used for scientific and industrial applications, fostering collaboration and innovation across numerous stakeholders. The solution will improve the reliability, accessibility, and security of robotic systems through well-defined practices and tools that enable interoperability and quality assurance. This effort will ultimately advance scientific understanding, empower community participation in marine technology development, and support critical societal needs, such as environmental monitoring and/or fisheries management. By enhancing the development and accessibility of open-source software for marine robotics, this project supports the United States' leadership in science and technology, addressing challenges that directly impact the health and prosperity of the nation. This POSE project focuses on the creation of a robust and scalable marine robotics open-source ecosystem. The project integrates and standardizes several existing open-source software frameworks and is 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. By strengthening the developer community and providing a framework for testing, quality control, and interoperability, this initiative elevates the role of open-source solutions both in marine robotics and in other fields facing similar challenges, such as space robotics. This effort produces outcomes that benefit the scientific community, industry, and society at large. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.