Ripples is a web infrastructure aiming to increase the awareness of operators and scientists while controlling multiple autonomous assets deployed in the open sea. Ripples aggregates information from robotic devices as well as ships, weather forecasting services and real-time scientist observations.

Ripples builds upon the LSTS Toolchain extending it by providing satellite communications, multi-vehicle planning and a web frontend for such systems.

Study of submesoscale ocean phenomena such as eddies, filaments and meanders requires high resolution in-situ sampling that can be addressed only via coordination of multiple assets over vast regions. Different challenges rise from this such as having communications over long distances at sea and reacting to this highly dynamic environment. As such, coordinating the actions of multiple vehicles requires a new type of framework that can endure communication and hardware faults while maintaining the operators in the loop.

In the Ocean when Phytoplankton (small/invisible Algae) die, they release a compound that is almost immediately used as a carbon and sulfur source by even the smallest organisms -Bacteria- to grow.

During this process of degradation is produced a gas called DMS (Dymetylsulfide). This gas is released to the atmosphere, that helps in the formation of clouds, making our planet cooler, counteracting the increase of temperature due to climate change.

Collecting geophysical data from water environments in remote or inaccessible locations is usually a logistically taxing and costly task. Small and instrumented buoys can provide a relatively low-cost tool for acquiring measurements either from remote locations in the open ocean or in continental environments such as lakes at high altitudes, ponds in salt marshes and mud flat in estuarine regions. The objective of RiaLogger has been to develop micro buoys that can be deployed from aerial platforms to simplify the entire operation.