DARPA researching marine creature responses for subsurface surveillance
Bioluminescent plankton, black sea bass and snapping shrimp: just some of the living resources the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) hopes to tap as part of a unique undersea surveillance programme.
The Persistent Aquatic Living Sensors (PALS) programme aims to develop sensors that can detect and record the behaviours of marine organisms and use this data to identify the presence of manned and unmanned underwater vehicles.
The programme is underway, with research having begun at the end of 2018. Five teams of researchers are developing systems for recording marine organisms’ stimulus responses, processing and communicating distilled alerts to
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