SEAMLESS aims at developing and adapting missing building blocks and enablers into a fully automated, economically viable, cost-effective, and resilient waterborne freight feeder loop service for Short Sea Shipping (SSS) and/or Inland Waterways Transport (IWT). Autonomous systems will be integrated to ensure safe, resilient, efficient, and environmentally friendly operation to shift road freight movements to hinterland waterways, while enhancing the performance of the TEN-T network. The service will be delivered 24/7 by a fleet of autonomous cargo shuttles, with humans-in-the-loop located in Remote Operation Centres (ROCs), which efficiently cooperate with automated and autonomous shore-side infrastructure and safely interact with conventional systems. The services will rely on a redesigned logistics system enabling seamless freight flows by minimising delays at intermodal nodes. A digital bird’s eye view of the supply chain allows the exploitation of real-time information for planning optimisation and reconfiguration to support resilient logistics, incl. digitalised administrative procedures. The SEAMLESS building blocks will be verified and validated by conducting full-scale demonstrations in selected real-world scenarios. Transferability will be fully demonstrated in selected use cases that cover a wide range of transport applications and geographical regions throughout Europe. Based on a structured methodological framework evaluating sustainability criteria, they will act as guidance for the replication of the project results beyond the project scope and timespan. Novel business models will be thus developed and provide a framework for implementing the SEAMLESS service to minimise investment risk for first movers. Regulatory gaps and challenges related to autonomous vessel operation (e.g. social aspects) will be identified, and recommendations for policy makers to allow the smooth and safe deployment of fully automated services will be provided.

PALAEMON proposes the development and evaluation of a sophisticated mass centralised evacuation system, based on a radical re-thinking of Mass Evacuation Vessels (MEVs) combined with an intelligent ecosystem of critical components providing real-time access to and representation of data to establish appropriate evacuation strategies for optimizing the operational planning of the evacuation process on damaged or flooded vessels. The intelligent ecosystem of PALAEMON incorporates innovative technologies for sensing, people monitoring and counting and localisation services as well as real-time data during accident time. These will be integrated into an independent, smart situation-awareness and guidance system for sustaining an active evacuation route for large crowds, making emergency response in EU passenger ships more efficient. Continuous monitoring and permanent control will enhance the capacity to detect, prevent and mitigate any issue and potential harm arising from physical and/or man-made accidents and disasters. The proposed ecosystem will include the new IMO standard for data exchange-VDES. Since maritime disasters in recent years are a stark reminder of the imperative need for timely and effective evacuation of large passenger ships during emergency the aim of this project is to maximize the effectiveness of passenger evacuation, during an emergency and/or a serious incident, from large Cruise and RoPax ships by combining the expertise of stakeholders from the field of cruise ship manufacturing, large cruise ship operators, classification societies, sensor and technology organizations, with a multidisciplinary group of innovators (incl. innovative start-ups, consolidated SMEs in the smart ICT domain, experts in the ship evacuation domain from research institutes, international networks in maritime and key industry drivers. MEVs prototypes will be validated in controlled enviroment and the smart evacuation ecosystem will be demostrated in two use cases.

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.

To unlock and boost new discoveries that will be crucial to face climate change, and regulate human actives, which will be key for both environmental conservation and socio-economical activities. We aim to make all the past, current, and future biological and oceanographic data available to everybody. Therefore, we will use relevant sleeping data, by designing new tools and methodologies to use and process relevant data already collected for different institutions, which may come from physical and chemical sensors, or video cameras. We will also harmonize the data, promoting tools to make them the standard among researchers and data-generator actors, developing protocols and best practices, like standardization tools as PUCK among marine sensors and monitoring platforms, and unifying libraries and resources (e.g., FanthomNet or Emodnet). At the same time, we will ensure a secured, sustained and reliable data flows by developing auto correction/validation methodologies and by publishing a set of tools and pipelines to ensure the trustfulness of data. Moreover, we will be using economies of scale and enhanced standardization to conduct several pilot sea-basin scale monitoring tests using two strategies: (1) using existing relevant sleeping data form online and partner repositories, and (2) using new data collected during field test demonstrations. Here, we will develop tools to better support assessment: studying and identifying key indicators and mechanisms to extract them from the data will generate the appropriate guidelines for policymaker, researchers, and socioeconomic sectors. Making those tools, methodologies, and implementations open source for the researchers and public in general will boost their utilization and improvement, even after the conclusion of the present project. With these demonstration examples, the international collaboration, and open source resources, we aim to make our proposal by fact the standard gold to follow in the following years

Battery-powered AUVs have been used to study the seabed without the requirement of a human operator. Their operational endurance is limited by the available battery charge. Gliders, an AUV subclass, use small changes in their buoyancy to move like a profiling float. By using their wings, gliders can convert the vertical motion to horizontal, propelling themselves forward with very low power consumption. Hence, mission duration can be extended to months and to thousands of kilometers. However, gliders are suited for a particular set of missions involving relatively basic measurements and seabed mapping cannot be performed due to their inherent inability to cruise in a straight line. A surface support vessel is standard practice for launch and recovery of AUVs. The requirement to have a support vessel adds to the overall mission cost. Therefore higher endurance is needed in AUV platforms in order to bring mission costs down and improve the ocean exploration capability. The ENDURUNS project will deliver a step-change in AUV technology by implementing a novel hybrid design power by hydrogen fuel cell. An Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) will support the operation of the AUV, providing geotagging and data transmission capability to and from the Control Centre on shore.