It’s easy to trust the mission software when everything’s green. Navigation error looks fine. Coverage percentage checks out. Timing graphs line up. But then you get back to shore, look at the actual data, and realize something went wrong, and you had no way to know it in the moment.
This talk walks through how Bedrock built an onboard system that puts data quality first, not as a post-processing step but as a live, real-time component of mission execution. The Onboard Report (OBR) doesn’t just track the vehicle. It interprets what the sonar is doing, how usable that data actually is, and whether what you’re mapping makes sense. It flags issues as they emerge and surfaces meaningful information to operators while there’s still time to course-correct.
We’ll share lessons learned from live survey operations, show how OBR has shifted how we think about autonomy, and make the case for a different kind of onboard intelligence. One that doesn’t assume your mission plan is going well just because the UI says so.
This kind of tooling shifts what “autonomy” should mean in subsea operations.
