Uncrewed Systems Technology 049 - April/May 2023

UK Aquatec +44 1256 416010 www.aquatecgroup.com Blueprint Subsea +44 1539 531536 www.blueprintsubsea.com C-MAX +44 1305 853005 www.cmaxsonar.com Coda Octopus +44 1315 531380 www.codaoctopus.com Impact Subsea +44 1224 460850 www.impactsubsea.co.uk L3Harris – www.l3harris.com Neptune Sonar +44 1262 490234 www.neptune-sonar.co.uk Ocean Acoustic Developments +44 1288 361652 www.oadltd.com SEA +44 1271 337500 www.sea.co.uk Sonardyne International +44 1252 872288 www.sonardyne.com Tritech International +44 1224 744111 www.tritech.co.uk Ultra Maritime +44 2088 134321 www.ultra.group Wavefront Systems – www.wavefront.systems USA Blue Robotics – www.bluerobotics.com Cerulean Sonar – www.ceruleansonar.com Chesapeake Technology +1 650 967 2045 www.chesapeaketech.com Edgetech Marine +1 508 291 0057 www.edgetech.com Falmouth Scientific +1 508 564 7640 www.falmouth.com Klein Marine Systems +1 603 893 6131 www.mind-technology.com/klein Kraken Robotics +1 709 757 5757 www.krakenrobotics.com Marine Sonic Technology +1 804 693 9602 www.marinesonic.com MASSA +1 781 749 4800 www.massa.com R2Sonic +1 512 891 0000 www.r2sonic.com Raytheon +1 781 522 3000 www.rtx.com Seafloor Systems +1 530 677 1019 www.seafloorsystems.com Sonar systems | Focus as important as ever for ensuring that the data is made available quickly and in high quality, easily accessible and actionable packages. Among these are lightweight data acquisition tool sets that generate easily digested displays of data, along with monitoring and tracking of survey information with vehicle and subsystem telemetry. This blending of informational and control systems is expected to continue, withmany open-source geospatial and hydrographic tools nowbeing used to create portals for persistent data flows between ocean vehicle assets and surveyors’ offices. By integrating autonomous sonar platforms with geospatial platforms and cloud servers, remote analysis of ocean data can be carried out in fine detail for each vehicle, wherever they are, even over very low bandwidth connections. Conclusion Accessibility and simplicity ofmarine data analytics is critical across all the supporting technologies for sonar, and companieswho can achieve that will find no shortage of interested parties in themaritime sector. UUVs are on the cusp of being widely deployed as resident systems in remote ocean assets, where they will periodically survey complex infrastructures such as subsea cables, energy installations and structural foundations, in constant exposure to harsh environmental conditions. This will put sonars to the test in terms of reliability over time andmean times between failures, as they undergo operations at depth and over durations never before weathered by uncrewed vehicles in real-world conditions. Whichever sonar systems can operate for the longest before needingmaintenance could prove themselves indispensable. Acknowledgements The author would like to thank Simon Barchard at Teledyne Marine, Tom Broomfield at Norbit, James Colebourn at Blueprint Subsea, Ben Grant at Impact Subsea and Rustom Jehangir at Blue Robotics for their help with researching this article. 107 Uncrewed Systems Technology | April/May 2023