GOATS: Generic Ocean Array Technology Sensors

The GOATS project, initiated in 1998 in collaboration between MIT and NURC, with the long-term objective of developing net-centric, autonomous underwater vehicle sensing concepts for littoral MCM and ASW. The core of the program is the exploitation of collaborative and environmentally adaptive, bi- and multi-static, passive and active sonar configurations for concurrent detection, classification and localization of subsea and bottom objects. A principal development has been the MOOS-IvP Nested Autonomy concept with onboard integrated acoustic sensing, signal processing and platform control algorithms for adaptive, collaborative, multiplatform REA, MCM, and ASW in unknown and unmapped littoral environments with uncertain navigation and communication infrastructure.

The MOOS autonomy middleware was developed under GOATS in 2001-02 by Paul Newman while he was holding a Post-doc appointment at MIT, and all autonomous vehicles operated by the lab are using MOOS. Another development under GOATS has been a nested, distributed command and control architecture that enables individual network nodes of clusters of nodes to complete the mission objectives, including target detection, classification, localization and tracking (DCLT), fully autonomously with no or limited communication with the network operators. The need for such a nested, autonomous communication, command and control architecture has become clear from the series of experiments carried out in the past under GOATS and several experiments carried out under the ONR UPS PLUSNet program.