Bristlemouth: An open connectivity standard for marine applications

We present a new, open marine connectivity standard – Bristlemouth – that has been developed to create an agile innovation platform for marine technology. Bristlemouth leverages advances from a number of fields – robotics, automotive, and industrial – to create an easy-to-adopt connectivity standard for an exceptionally broad range of use cases. Bristlemouth is a full-stack physical connectivity standard, akin to USB. The open specification covers the physical connector, interface electronics that can be implemented in a postage stamp-sized circuit, and networking and application protocols. The Bristlemouth standard already provides plug-and-play interoperability of hardware modules in state-of-the-art marine technology applications, such as global networks of metocean buoys and real-time reef monitoring systems. The open dissemination of this standard aims to facilitate progress across the marine community, scaling ocean sensing, making ocean data more available, and reducing cost and complexity of building and integrating marine systems.