62 Autonomous vessels for marine applications continue to be developed andmatured in a similar manner to that observed in UAVs over the past few years. That is, they are highly optimised and specialised, and are produced in batches of nomore than a few hundred rather than, say, thousands of units, as might be seen elsewhere in the uncrewed systems market. Where they might once have been purely hydrography and mine survey solutions though, USVs are now being used for increasingly complex and close-up work (rather than making observations at a distance) in a number of important contexts. Environmental clean-ups The world’s oceans are a major area of concern for environmentalists. Fortunately, more and more organisations are recognising that uncrewed vessels can mitigate the damage frommarine waste. For example, Subsea Tech was recently invited to take part in a Horizon 2020 project known as SeaClear (SEarch, identificAtion and Collection of marine Litter with Autonomous Robots), to gauge the extent to which the company’s solutions could detect and collect litter from the seabed. “To that end, we developed our SeaCAT USV’s inter-deployment capabilities, and had it simultaneously stow and deploy two of our ROVs while in the water,” explains Yves Chardard, owner and CEO of Subsea Tech. “The SeaCAT is a 6.8 m vessel and doesn’t have a huge amount of space, but we managed to deploy our Tortuga ROV from the stern, and our Mini Tortuga ROV from the bow. We then updated our autonomous navigation systems to make sure the ROVs could swim close enough to each other but without interfering with each other or the USV.” The concept of operations (CONOPS) was for the Mini Tortuga to map the seafloor as well as identifying and geolocating litter, while the Tortuga would collect any litter and deliver it into a basket suspended from the SeaCAT. Rory Jackson looks at how some developers are meeting demands for uncrewed marine craft to carry out specialised tasks Special editions June/July 2023 | Uncrewed Systems Technology
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