Maka Niu

Maka Niu (“coconut eye”) was a low-cost oceanographic camera and sensor platform that enabled the exploration of undersea environments using a new pressure-tolerant camera housing, built in conjunction with the MIT Future Ocean Lab. The Maka Niu project was originally conceived as a system for K12 educational workshops with the Polynesian Voyaging Society and Kamehameha Schools, but demonstrated the potential to revolutionize low-cost deep-sea imaging and sensing.

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Maka Niu was designed based on extensive interviews with scientists, conservationists, and educators worldwide. It was a self-contained deep-sea camera system that recorded at full high definition 1080p @30fps and was depth-rated to 1,500 m. It also included depth and temperature sensing, as well as automatic GPS-based georeferencing. It was intended to have a modular design for future capabilities and an expandable range of sensors. Mission programming was done on an easy-to-use web-based interface optimized for mobile use on any device. Data could be uploaded to Tator, a video annotation platform developed and hosted by our partner, CVision AI, for analysis.

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Maka Niu was a community-driven project that allowed people to explore and monitor their marine resources. Based on off-the-shelf single-board computers and readily available microprocessors, Maka Niu was inexpensive to produce, easy to program, and simple to use. Designed as an open platform for scientific education and exploration, it was built to give classrooms and communities the ability to upload video and sensor data into FathomNet, a centralized platform where machine learning algorithms assist with classification of marine species, seabed substrate, and accumulated time-series sensor data, with the data made publicly available for visualization, sharing, and discussion with policymakers from the local to global levels.

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With support from NOAA’s Ocean Technology Transition program, Ocean Discovery League has transitioned from Maka Niu to our new system, DORIS (Deep Ocean Research and Imaging System). Developed in partnership with Blue Robotics, with additional support for module development and training from the Pacific Islands Ocean Observing System (PacIOOS), Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, DORIS builds directly on lessons learned from Maka Niu while greatly expanding its capabilities.

 

DORIS is rated to 6,000 meters and records 4K video and still imagery optimized for low-light deep-sea environments. The untethered drop-lander is compact enough to deploy from a small boat and is built around interchangeable modules for navigation and communication, 24-hour battery endurance, camera and lighting, and CTD and CO₂/O₂ sensing. With a target base price under $10,000 and an intuitive graphical interface for mission planning and data retrieval, DORIS carries forward Maka Niu’s core commitment to low cost, ease of use, and broad access, and puts deep-sea exploration within reach of researchers and communities worldwide.