Press Release: Project SUMARE

The International Centre for Island Technology (ICIT), part of the Department of Civil & Offshore Engineering, has recently embarked on a three year research project in the field of autonomous seabed mapping technology. Project SUMARE (SUrvey of MArine REsources) aims to demonstrate the usefulness of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for remote sensing of seabed environments. Project co-ordinator is the Management Unit of Mathematical Modelling (MUMM) for the North Sea, part of the Belgian Institute for Natural Sciences. Along with ICIT, other partners include the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique 13S (CNRS) and Thomson Marconi Sonar, both of France, and the Insituto Superior Tecnico (IST) of Portugal.

Accurate environmental modelling may provide competent authorities with the data to allow safe and sustainable exploitation of natural resources. Besides obvious savings in terms of time and money associated with the use of oceanographic survey ships, autonomous sensors offer the possibility of: (i) adaptively selecting the regions to be surveyed in response to observed data; (ii) exploiting the morphological characteristics of the sampled field to improve accuracy and consistency. This technology may also be able to replace humans (e.g. divers) for operation in hostile environments, achieving possible goals set by health and safety.

The use of autonomous sensors in this context, which basically will allow a vehicle to make guidance decisions based on the information it is collecting, is highly innovative. So far, participation in the AUV market has been limited to major research institutes and the military, for reasons of cost. It is a goal of this project to facilitate wider participation in the AUV market by demonstrating the use of smaller, relatively less expensive AUVs, in marine environmental modelling. It is hoped that the marketing experience of TMS will be pivotal in achieving this goal.

Marine environmental modelling is a developing field and autonomous sensing technology can have numerous applications. The exploitation of seabed resources particularly demands accurate and timely information to ensure the development of sustainable use patterns. Two case studies are planned:

1. Belgium: monitoring of the volumetric evolution of sand banks;
2. Orkney: mapping live and dead deposits of maerl.

ICIT has been involved in the study of maerl (calcareous deposits derived from microscopic species' of red algae) for some time and will be responsible for producing much of the data which will feed into the development of the sensing and processing systems carried by the AUV.

Project SUMARE is funded by the Information Society Technologies (IST) Programme, which is a major theme of research and technological development within the European Union's Fifth RTD Framework Programme (1998-2002).