ERA is a dual-project program in cybernetics and environmental monitoring and control and the use of coordinated networks of autonomous and semi-autonomous robots and sensors in terrestrial and space operations. There are two permanent Projects - ASTRIC focused upon modular structures, senbsor networks, robot networks, and Space, and Tethys, focused upon environmental and climate monitoring and prediction that emphasizes water bodies, particularly freshwater lakes and streams. The fundamental control systems are based upon GHCM theory, architecture, simulation and future implementations.

Both Projects are closely-coupled in terms of foundamental cybernetics and control theory and technology including robotic architectures. The Tethys Project is presently absorbed strongly in the phase-2 work on ASTRIC.

This project is intended and planned to grow and expand significantly within the next ten years. There will be multiple steps and stages for different teams as work progresses into system implementation.

Integrated Space-based and Earth-based Analytics and Forecasting of Environmental Changes and Adaptations within Inland Seas and Freshwater Sources

Project TETHYS is a research program in search of the right questions and then the right answers for how we can employ our planetary freshwater lakes and streams in the best ways to sustain life on Earth in the face of inevitable, progressive and probably changes which could threaten human and other forms of life.

There is climate change and aspects of its current progression are difficult to predict. There are other threats to organized human life and life in general that may come from within the Earth or from beyond it, and in many cases the effects on freshwater bodies may be dramatic. In many cases we cannot prevent certain events and consequences that will follow. In most cases we can hope to adapt and do our best. TETHYS is about producing the best toolsets of knowledge and skills for us to adapt in ways that will optimize the outcomes in favor of survival and sustainability.

TETHYS aims to examine what we have been studying – our datasets, our methods of analysis, and our processes of modeling and forecasting. Its objectives are to consider what we have available and what is feasible, in the way of technologies, and to employ them more effectively, most effectively, so that the ecosystems of freshwater bodies such as major lakes and river systems around the world can become a multi-dimensional “barometer” for what is also transpiring and changing elsewhere on our planet, including in our mid-continent regions, our deep oceans, and in the interfaces between earth, water and sky that determine how our crops will grow, how maritime food sources will be maintained, and how the changes imposed by our changing climate will affect our water and soil and air in the future.

As one example, TETHYS will study, using resources that are orbiting in space, airborne, on the surface and also subsurface, the changes in persistent organophosphate pollutants that are being released from thawing and melting permafrost regions and subsequently deposited on our soils and in our waters.