Sponsored by the Office of Naval Research, this JPL project was to build an infrastructure and behaviors for enabling robust autonomous execution of common maritime scenarios. I worked primarily on the autonomous behaviors themselves; the set of actions that the individual boats took under certain missions. The design challenges of this project were quite exciting, and included:

• Developing individual agent behaviors that emerged to a swarm behavior without any explicit group-level planning. That is, each agent was free to conduct its own behavior, and agents were supposed to act based on their best possible picture of the world right now.

• Operating in noisy communications and high false positive detection rate environments (is that a big wave or a boat?)

• Multi-objective agents; it wasn't enough to just patrol an area, but instead the agents had to keep an eye out for intruders, follow-up on potential intruders with closer inspection by alternative instruments, escort friendlies, etc.

Probably the funnest part of this project was sitting on the boats, compiling code on my laptop that I was immediately pushing out to the whole swarm, as we wzoomed across the water (at gut-lurching speed!), them faithfully executing the behaviors I had programmed for them; if we crashed, it was potentially my fault, and if we succeeded at an elegant patrol route without a hitch, it was my doing too.