MAK Awarded for Excellence in M&S at BlueTIDE 2024
By Tim Collins
It was an honor to represent MAK alongside Stephen Landry at #BlueTIDE2024 hosted by 401 Tech Bridge last week, and I’m thrilled to share that our work was recognized with the award for Excellence in the Digital Twin Modeling and Simulation category.
The BlueTIDE event, organized by 401 Tech Bridge—a consortium focused on driving commercial innovation in Rhode Island—highlighted the collaboration between industry and naval partners through the development of innovative ocean technology. The event took place at the Narragansett Bay Test Facility (NBTF) at the Naval Undersea Warfare Center, where we participated in a live exercise that involved various autonomous aquatic drones following specific routes to collect data on a few predetermined metrics. Our team provided an AI-generated ocean floor within the MAK ONE Synthetic Environment, creating a 2D and 3D virtual world to represent the exercise and the participating Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) tasked with finding targets on the ocean floor.
We also partnered with MarksetBot, Open Ocean Robotics, and JaiaBot to develop digital twin models of their products, enabling pre-mission planning of their routes within MAK’s Computer Generated Forces (CGF), VR-Forces. We also worked with Sunfish to incorporate their bathymetry data of the area, captured throughout the event and on-site, to be rendered within VR-Forces for post-mission analysis.
Additionally, we participated in the demo showcase at Sail Newport, where experts across industries presented advancements in undersea communications, digital twin modeling and simulation, persistent monitoring and sensing, and autonomous systems. The interactive exhibits allowed us to see the latest technological developments firsthand, and the networking sessions provided valuable opportunities to connect with industry peers, innovators, government representatives, and academic institutions.
It was a great event all around and we were glad to be a part of it!