Unmanned Systems Technology 042 | Mayflower Autonomous Ship | Embedded Computing | ElevonX Sierra VTOL | UUVs insight | Flygas Engineering GAS418S | Ocean Business 2021 report | Electric motors | Priva Kompano

84 O ne of the few in-person exhibitions to go ahead last year, Ocean Business took place as before at the National Oceanographic Centre in Southampton on England’s south coast. It brought together builders of manned and unmanned vehicle platforms, mission systems and sensors with service providers and offshore operators involved in the renewable energy, oil & gas, subsea mining, environmental monitoring and remediation sectors, as well as ocean science broadly. Planet Ocean promoted its ecoSUB family of miniature AUVs at the show, along with systems made by partners including Obscape’s range of environmental systems and Marine Sonic Technology’s ARC II sidescan sonar. With production systems available since 2020, the ecoSUB family consists of a 4 kg, 111 mm-diameter micro AUV dubbed the ecoSubu5 that is rated for depths down to 500 m, and two 12 kg, 146 mm-diameter mini AUVs called the ecoSUBm5 and ecoSUBm25 rated for 500 m and 2500 m respectively. The ecoSUBu5 measures 660 mm long in the body plus an inline antenna that takes the total length to 925 mm, while its larger siblings are 1000 mm long. Since we featured the family in UST 28 (October/November 2019) a number of specialised versions with mission-focused preconfigured sensor and equipment fits have been developed. Based on the ecoSUBm5, the Scout series is configured for survey missions. The series is equipped with the Scout ARC Mk II 1800 kHz sidescan sonar from Marine Sonic Technologies (MST) and a nano-modem. The simplest Scout Lite configuration completes its fit with a Sea Scan echo altimeter from MST. The baseline Scout forgoes the echo altimeter but adds a DVL A-50 Doppler velocity log from Water Linked and a GoPro camera with a housing rated to 300 m. The top-of-the-range Scout+ adds a conductivity and temperature (CT) sensor from Valeport to the baseline Scout package. The Science series consists of variants of both the ecoSUBu5 and the m5; the smaller vehicle, known as the u5 SVP, is Peter Donaldson reports from this marine systems and services expo with highlights of some of the wares on offer Making waves February/March 2022 | Unmanned Systems Technology Ocean Business 21 was held at the National Oceanography Centre in Southampton, UK, in October, and revealed many new vehicles and subsystems (Photos courtesy of ASV Photography)