BLADE-MARITIME Governance Node: Authority-Governed Maritime Surveillance Node with Hydroacoustic, Magnetic Anomaly Detection, and Multi-Modal Sensor Fusion for Autonomous Maritime Threat Assessment

Project Overview

BLADE-MARITIME is a hardware-enforced, authority-governed maritime surveillance architecture designed to control when an autonomous maritime system is allowed to act. Rather than relying solely on sensor outputs or AI-driven perception, the system introduces an independent governance layer that evaluates multi-modal sensor trust in real time and regulates authority before any action is executed.

At its core, the system answers a critical operational question:

“Should the system be allowed to act given current uncertainty, environmental conditions, and potential adversarial threats?”

To address this, BLADE-MARITIME implements a nine-stage governance pipeline that processes hydroacoustic, magnetic anomaly detection (MAD), AIS, radar, and navigation inputs through trust evaluation, deception analysis, authority computation, consensus validation, and recovery mechanisms before enabling any downstream action. The architecture integrates probabilistic reasoning (Dempster-Shafer trust fusion), continuous authority modulation under sea-state dynamics, acoustic-delay-aware Byzantine consensus, and hardware-level fail-safe enforcement via a normally-open relay interlock.

Unlike conventional maritime autonomy approaches that rely on software-level decision-making, BLADE-MARITIME enforces safety and authority at the hardware boundary, ensuring that unsafe or unverified actions cannot physically propagate through the system. This design provides resilience against acoustic spoofing, AIS deception, MAD interference, GNSS spoofing, and communication degradation in contested maritime environments.

The project includes a fully reproducible system design with complete hardware specifications, simulation environment, and open engineering artifacts, enabling independent validation and extension. While current results are based on simulation and pre-certification design targets, the system is engineered toward real-world deployment under MIL-STD-461G and MIL-STD-810G constraints.

BLADE-MARITIME further demonstrates cross-domain applicability of authority-governed autonomy, extending the BLADE-EDGE framework (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.19177472) into the maritime domain and reinforcing the concept as a generalizable safety architecture across defense, maritime, and critical infrastructure systems.

Technical Description

BLADE-MARITIME introduces a hardware-enforced authority gating architecture for maritime autonomous systems using Dempster-Shafer trust fusion and a nine-stage governance pipeline:

SATA → ADARA → IFF → HMAA → MAIVA → FLAME → CARA → BDA → EFFECTOR

Four core maritime-specific mathematical extensions are implemented: (1) Dempster-Shafer fused trust combining hydroacoustic and MAD sensors, (2) recursive phantom vessel deception-risk estimation for AIS spoofing detection, (3) continuous sea-state authority damping function for dynamic environmental adaptation, and (4) acoustic-delay-aware Byzantine consensus with timing residual weighting.

Five primary governance modules — SATA (sensor trust fusion), HMAA (authority computation with sea-state damping), MAIVA (Byzantine consensus under acoustic delay), FLAME (deliberation windows), and CARA (GREP deterministic recovery) — execute across a dual-compute architecture consisting of an NVIDIA Jetson AGX Orin and an AMD Xilinx Zynq UltraScale+ FPGA.

The platform defines an 84-component system architecture with fully specified electrical and mechanical connections, totaling approximately $43,476 ($15,476 internal BOM + $28,000 government-furnished equipment). All engineering artifacts are included, including simulation, configuration data, bill of materials, electrical and mechanical specifications, assembly guide, and system schematic.

All results are derived from simulation and design validation; hardware certification and field validation are ongoing work. The architecture targets defense-grade operational environments and demonstrates the portability of authority-governed autonomy across domains, including defense (BLADE-EDGE), autonomous vehicles (BLADE-AV), and maritime surveillance systems.