The Importance of "FAIR by design" data in marine robotics

Observing, studying, and understanding processes taking place in the marine environment is now more vital than ever. The advancements in marine technology and the use of autonomous robotic platforms, give access to ground-breaking observations. Innovative robots enable the monitoring of unknown marine locations and the study of pristine habitats without influencing or modifying them. Moreover, marine robots are bridging the observational gap in marine sciences by gathering an increasing amount of unique data. These novel, non-standard robotic platforms, which include autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) and surface vehicles (ASVs), Remotely operated vehicle (ROV) and Unmanned Semi-Submersible Vehicle (USSV) are designed to overcome environmental limits, ensuring the safety of human operators and paving the way to the observation of challenging marine environments, such as Arctic and Antarctic regions, transitional water, and areas with very shallow water conditions, where conventional data collection methods are often ineffective. The marine robotics group at the Italian National Research Council Institute of Marine Engineering (CNR-INM) in Genoa has decades of experience in developing highly modular and reconfigurable autonomous robotic platforms that enable access and monitoring in critical environments and in experimental data acquisition campaigns. Moreover, the increasing use of these robotic platforms as technological enablers for innovative services is leading to the collection of large amounts of data, which require efficient management strategies for storage, historical preservation and sharing, increasing both their scientific value and their valuable utility in the development of sustainable management policies for the marine environment. The creation of common standards and infrastructure for data management, based on FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles, will allow the integration of data from different sources, including non-standard ones, making them available to a broader audience of researchers, administrators, and citizens. This contribution will outline the efforts of the CNR-INM group in developing and implementing a framework for the acquisition and management of combined environmental and robotic datasets, enabling the generation of integrated "FAIR by design" data. The purpose of this work, which recognizes the centrality of data through the implementation of the FAIR principles, is to facilitate the long-term preservation, sharing, and reuse of these datasets. With this new perspective in mind, it is possible to contribute actively and meaningfully to the global effort of ocean observation, supported and sponsored by the United Nations through the Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development (2021-2030), crucial for the safeguarding of the entire planet.