With the advent of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and other mobile surface platforms, marine robotics have had substantial impact on the oceanographic sciences. These systems have allowed scientists to collect data over temporal and spatial scales that would be logistically impossible or prohibitively expensive using traditional ship-based measurement techniques. Increased dependence of scientists on such robots has permeated scientific data gathering conducted by ship-based observations

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... or data from fixed moorings. Future field campaigns will not only depend on these platforms, but an entire infrastructure of people, processes, and software; on shore and at sea. Recent field experiments carried out with a number of surface and underwater platforms give clues to how these technologies are coalescing and need to work together. We highlight one such confluence and describe a future trajectory of needs and desires for autonomous marine robotic platforms. We describe a 2010 inter-disciplinary experiment in the Monterey Bay involving multiple platforms, and collaborators with diverse science goals. One important goal was to enable situational awareness, planning and collaboration before, during, and after this large-scale collaborative exercise. We present the overall view of the experiment and describe an important shore-side component, the Oceanographic Decision Support System (ODSS), its impact and future directions leveraging such technologies for field experiments.