Robots and autonomous systems give us unprecedented access to landscapes and habitats both big and small.  They provide in-situ monitoring of the environments they are immersed in and can adapt their strategies to respond to various external stimuli.  These systems enable us to more richly and extensively interact with the world we live in, better our understanding of the complexities of the world, and assist in the discovery of new processes and phenomena.  However, there are significant and unique autonomy challenges when working in natural unstructured environments like oceans and rivers.  Robot dynamics are tightly coupled to those of the environment, while communication and localization are limited.

Control under these conditions can be exacting, but environmental dynamics may be harnessed to plan energy efficient paths and to maintain network connectivity.  Networked robot teams can collect data to construct high fidelity models of the environmental dynamics which can be integrated into robot control and planning.  Those same models can be used to guide robot control and sampling strategies to increase their predictive power.  In this talk, I will present our vision and efforts toward building a smart ocean observational framework which can be deployed to improve forecasting of weather-climate systems, mitigation of contaminant dispersions, and coordination of maritime search and rescue and humanitarian efforts.