CENTER OF EXCELLENCE
MIREES Research Spotlight
Since the establishment of this Center of Excellence, MIREES has made significant contributions to the Nation's understanding of maritime domain awareness and safeguarding populations and properties unique to the U.S. maritime domain, including islands, ports, and remote and extreme environments. A few key research highlights are listed below.
Layered Maritime Domain Awareness: Large-area, satellite-based surveillance is an essential capability in the development of Maritime Domain Awareness, particularly in ship detection, classification and identification. The goal of the Layered Maritime Domain Awareness project is to detect vessels, including small ships, in the coastal ocean and high seas or when approaching and leaving ports, sensitive coastal regions and denied access regions. In conjunction with satellite surveillance, HF Radar surveillance research focuses on surface current mapping and detecting vessels over the horizon. The near-shore surveillance is accomplished via the use of acoustic and electro-optic identification of threats, such as swimmers, divers, vessels, and semi-submersibles.
Unmanned Port Security Vessel (UPSV): The UPSV is a robotic platform designed to support maritime missions in harbor and port environments including infrastructure inspection and incident response and recovery, and harbor surveillance. Rapidly deployable, the vessel can be used to map the seafloor in high resolution, photograph critical infrastructure, detect chemical leaks or spills, and relay real-time video—all at the same time.
Autonomous Power Station: Researchers in the Autonomous Power Station program are building a remote-controlled system for powering sensors in remote and extreme environments. The system will operate primarily on wind or sunlight. Currently designed for high-frequency radar applications, the system can be scaled to meet other remote power generation needs.
Harbor Acoustic Monitoring: This program uses high-resolution monitoring of nearshore, harbor, and inland waterway regions in order to address perceived threats to domestic shipping and waterside facilities from surface and underwater vessels and divers. The vessels of interest range in size from the largest post-Panamax container ships down to small powered boats and small, unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs). The interest in diver detection extends to both open-circuit and closed-circuit (re-breather) dive systems.
Coastal Radars: The coastal radar program addresses a number of important areas essential to providing persistent coverage of the large areas surrounding islands. Researchers measure currents and wave heights. They also seek ways to increase efficiency and lower the costs of coastal radars.
Decision Support System: This research seeks to understand and improve the complex collaborations of emergency response efforts: How can training be used to improve the ability of responders to coordinate effectively in emergencies? In particular, what gets in the way of coordination? How can training before an emergency and the framing of communication during the emergency improve the abilities of teams to perform, even in the face of divergent personal objectives?
System Resilience: Involves the development of simple yet effective methodologies that ports can use to evaluate their resilience and strategies for port authorities to improve their resilience, both focusing on technological systems and service delivery as well as on the organizational level. Additionally, it deals with metrics that are needed for evaluating resilience at a given time.
Electro-Optics Surveillance: This type of surveillance uses video analytics in the visible spectrum and in various wavelengths of infrared. The research focuses on video tracking and identification of vessels in conjunction with other methods, such as acoustics.