Project description
Seabed mapping with autonomous vessels
Seas and oceans play a vital role in the economy and societal well-being, with offshore infrastructure like ports, wind farms and aquaculture facilities becoming increasingly common. However, traditional methods for seabed mapping and infrastructure inspection rely on expensive, crewed vessels with limited endurance. To address this, the EU-funded MERLIN project will deploy hydrogen-powered unmanned surface vessels and autonomous underwater vessels that operate autonomously using AI algorithms. These vessels will perform a range of tasks, including seabed mapping, habitat monitoring and port inspections, while collecting samples and recovering sensors. A mission remote control centre will enable seamless communication and command transmission, enhancing operational efficiency and expanding the vessels’ capabilities for complex underwater missions.
Objective
The importance of our seas and oceans to the economy and societal well-being is broadly acknowledged. In addition, offshore infrastructure in the form of ports, wind farms, aquaculture facilities, natural gas pipes, etc. has continuously expanded and has become more commonplace in recent years. Activities associated with seabed mapping, monitoring of the health and status of marine habitats, offshore infrastructure inspection, seabed mining and underwater sensing have traditionally been based on the use of crewed support vessels which are expensive to run and have limited endurance. The MERLIN project seeks to exploit long-endurance operational capabilities offered through the use of hydrogen fuel cells and renewable energy installed onboard Unmanned Surface Vessels (USV) and Autonomous Underwater Vessels (AUVs) which are capable of navigating and operating autonomously based on AI algorithms without the need for human intervention. A Mission Remote Control Centre (MRCC) will permit data from the autonomous vessels to be transmitted to base. Conversely, the MRCC will allow the transmission of commands from the supervisor to the robotic vehicles. The vehicles will incorporate advanced surface and underwater grasping capability for the collection of samples, handling, installation and recovery of sensors using custom-built robotic arms. The USV will provide geotagging reference data to the AUVs when they operate underwater and be able to track them during the mission. The USV will be able to navigate from its base to the location of the mission where the AUVs will be released. At the end of the mission the AUVs will dock again with the USV so they can be safely returned to base. The vehicles will be capable of operating independently as well as in combination with support vessels . The demonstration activities include three different high value use cases, including marine habitat monitoring, underwater volcano seabed mapping, and port infrastructure inspection.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.
- agricultural sciencesagriculture, forestry, and fisheriesfisheries
- natural sciencesearth and related environmental sciencesgeologyvolcanology
- engineering and technologyelectrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineeringelectronic engineeringsensors
- engineering and technologyenvironmental engineeringenergy and fuels
You need to log in or register to use this function
We are sorry... an unexpected error occurred during execution.
You need to be authenticated. Your session might have expired.
Thank you for your feedback. You will soon receive an email to confirm the submission. If you have selected to be notified about the reporting status, you will also be contacted when the reporting status will change.
Keywords
Programme(s)
Call for proposal
(opens in new window) HORIZON-CL4-2024-DIGITAL-EMERGING-01
See other projects for this callFunding Scheme
HORIZON-RIA - HORIZON Research and Innovation ActionsCoordinator
B15 2TT Birmingham
United Kingdom