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42MTRMay 2012of testing in, first of all it costs you a hundred thousand dollars because you need to get the boat, the personnel to run things. You need the platform and trained personnel. MI: Yes you need everything associated with that vehicle and so you end up testing 40 hours a year maybe. Because you only test 40 hours a year 30 of that is redundancy. You end up checking the system so there are many vehicles that don't see the water as much as we do in a week. For us this whole development, this partnership with the ven- dors the whole thing, open API's, the library, the compo- nent vendors getting on board is a great environment for this mushrooming of capabilities with AUV's. This has been coming up with most of the individualsI have talked to in the industry. There has been talk about the vendors finally getting on board and allowing the end users the ability to build in what they need. It is moving many projects forward. On average how many projects are you working on? MI: It's the Navy way to give you about 30% more than you can actually do. My desk is overflowing with projects and my brain is overflowing with ideas. There is not enough time, people or money to do all the good thingsthat need to be done. All the people in my department have multiple projects. It is very rare that you are working on a single project, which is very different from 20 years ago. Business was different then. There would be this big program and they would hire 300 people and the project would have a 5-year time frame and there was allot of money. Now the projects are much smaller projects with much faster time lines and they are not coordinated so one might be in the big push while another is inthe investigative stage. You are doing all you can to keep the plates spinning, which is interesting and challenging in its own right. One of the things the Navy has done is to skim the administrative support layers so that most people are not only taking care of technology work but also taking care of allot of administration. We do have some help and they are terrific, but we do allot of moni- toring of funds and taking care of personnel. I recently spoke with someone at one of WHOI's labs and it is interesting that much of what the scientists are studying are being dictated by the military. In other words if the military is studying in the Arctic then sci- entists jump on those coat tails to get their work done. A lot of research is funded in ways by the military. MI:Yes I think that is true in some senses, especially with the AUV's. Traditionally it has been the Office of Naval Research, and behind it all is a military machine. I have to confess that although I am a scientist I am closer to theoperational side than I am to the science. I am a naval reserve officer and I have a pretty good feel for what has to happen in the military and I still have allot of ties to those guys that are making the decisions about war fight- ing capabilities including AUV's. That keeps me pretty close to the operations, as a matter of fact allot of what we have done with the Iver2 has been through a direct inter- face with the Naval Warfare Group that are looking for this new paradigm. A paradigm where they have an organ- ic asset with them in the fleet so that when they have a search and survey mission on the site they don't get on the horn and say hey can you get out here in a month with your AUV platoon or with their containers and highly trained guys. Then they do the job and leave and two weeks later they need them again. What they are looking for is something they can have on site and use it when they need to. They can support the seal teams and so forth. That has been a great thing for us because it fits our paradigm that is moving AUV's forward. We have a capa- ble vehicle that a guy can run by himself, it doesn't need a special, and by the way he wants it to do something dif- ferent every week. Turns out it works well and we don't have to go back to the vendor. OceanServer has been the most reactive contract I have ever worked with, they are fantastic, but their expertise is not in military applications so we have people back here that can do that in fact. We build these behaviors and put it in the back seat and have it out in the fleet in two weeks. This is unheard of. Last Monday the guys from the oper- ational test and evaluation force called us and said we are pulling a mind field down in Florida and we would like to see if you guys can survey these things without spending $750,000, which is what it takes to survey a mine field today in a traditional sense with a tow fish and boat on site and so forth. If you called a year or two ago there would have been a long process that would have had to happen, but two days later we had the missions planned for this thing. We had the vehicle in the mail and I leave on Monday to go down and throw these things in the water. I think we will have the maps of these things and all the bathymetry associated with it and our total cost is a fraction of what itwould take with traditional means.MTR#4 (34-49):MTR Layouts 4/27/2012 9:46 AM Page 42