ECOBOTICS.SEA is a future-oriented 4-year research project with a research-driven human-resources training network in its center. ECOBOTICS.SEA focuses on the research of underwater robotics and biomimetics concepts and technology, targeting problems and needs in the real world that are related to the study of biospheres, species and ecosystems and their preservation. 8 Early-Stage Research Projects (ESRP) compose the research plan. The research to be carried out in these 8 ESRP is organized into 5 scientific work packages. The core of the research activities is constituted by 88 months of secondments within the partner network which are essential for ensuring the required knowledge and know-how transfer between the partners. The partner network is composed by 3 universities and R&D institutes and 3 companies located in European member states, plus 1 R&D in Third Countries. The consortium is highly interdisciplinary, aggregating excellence from various domains, including robotics,biomimetics for water/underwater systems, automation, biology, ecosystem preservation, entrepreneurship and anthropology applied to species preservation. Workshops, summer schools and international conferences serve as complementary measures, not only for further stimulating the exchange of knowledge and providing training, namely to the ESRs, but also for achieving the 4 scientific objectives as specified in the proposal. ECOBOTICS.SEA also incorporates a detailed and well defined career and risk management and training towards application-oriented R&D. Finally, the project is planned to establish an open community that will grow over time and enlarge its impact during and beyond the period of this project, resulting in a lasting, truly international R&D and business network beyond the project’s lifetime.

Natural radioactivity in the marine environment has been present since the Earth’s formation, while artificial radionuclides were introduced into the oceans in 1944. More recent direct sources exist that feed the oceans, such as low-level liquid discharges from reprocessing plants, large-scale releases due to disasters (e.g. Fukushima hit by the tsunami in 2011), and smaller-scale radiological events. Exploration of submarine environments should consider the existence of radioactivity in terms of its short- and long-term impact on marine and coastal ecosystems, also in correlation to natural hazards, such as seismic activity over submarine faults. Significantly undersampled in oceans, radioactivity poses real risks to marine ecosystems and human population, urging for detailed, data-driven modelling. RAMONES aims to offer new and efficient solutions for in situ, continuous, long-term monitoring of radioactivity in harsh subsea environments. A new generation of submarine radiation-sensing instruments, assisted by SoA robotic and artificial intelligence (AI) will be developed towards understanding radiation related risks near and far from coastal areas, while providing data towards shaping new policies and guidelines for environmental sustainability, economic growth and human health. The main ambition is to lay a radical new path to close the existing marine radioactivity under-sampling gap and foster new interdisciplinary research in threatened natural deep-sea ecosystems. RAMONES will invest a significant effort to provide tools for long-term, rapid deployments, propose new AI-driven and supported methodologies, and offer scaled-up solutions to researchers, policy makers and communities. RAMONES will combine SoA equipment from various disciplines and advanced modelling in fine synergy, and design new and effective approaches for the marine environment to provide efficient response to natural and man-made hazards, shaping future policies for the global population.

The deterioration of water quality, caused by climatic/seasonal changes, or industrial waste etc. is a major global concern. Over the last decade, water quality observing technology has risen to the challenge of scientists to identify and mitigate poor water quality by providing them with cost-effective tools that can take measurements of essential biogeochemical variables autonomously. Yet, despite these options becoming more readily available, there is a gap between the technology and the end-user (including the investigators and technicians that deploy these technologies) due to a collective lack of training, in-depth knowledge, and skilled workers who can meet new and emerging challenges. There is also a disconnect between data quality, data gathering by autonomous sensors and data analysis, which is a major obstacle, as the sensors are already being deployed (e.g. through buoys, boats etc.). AQUASENSE will address these challenges through 15 early stage researchers (ESRs), who will receive 540 person-month of unparalleled multidisciplinary training in the field of water quality monitoring. Each ESR will be mentored by carefully selected experts from academia and industry in 9 European countries (UK, Germany, Ireland, Serbia, Sweden, Italy, Poland, Austria, Estonia) and will have access to state-of-the-art equipment to develop autonomous sensors for improved data quality. The autonomous underwater robots and drones will be used to improve the data gathering and AI methods will be used to improve the data analysis. Hands-on project training will be supplemented with formal training courses in relevant fields such as new materials, sensors fabrication, wireless communication, system integration, and robotics, and a variety of complementary courses such as IPR, grant writing and exploiting the scientific results. Mobility within the network will ensure exposure to complementary academic and industrial research environments.

The WiMUST (Widely scalable Mobile Underwater Sonar Technology) project aims at expanding and improving the functionalities of current cooperative marine robotic systems, effectively enabling distributed acoustic array technologies for geophysical surveying with a view to exploration and geotechnical applications. Recent developments have shown that there is vast potential for groups of marine robots acting in cooperation to drastically improve the methods available for ocean exploration and exploitation. Traditionally, seismic reflection surveying is performed by vessel towed streamers of hydrophones acquiring reflected acoustic signals generated by acoustic sources (either towed or onboard a vessel). In this context, geotechnical surveying for civil and commercial applications (e.g., underwater construction, infrastructure monitoring, mapping for natural hazard assessment, environmental mapping, etc.) aims at seafloor and sub-bottom characterization using towed streamers of fixed length that are extremely cumbersome to operate. The vision underlying the WiMUST proposal is that of developing advanced cooperative and networked control / navigation systems to enable a large number (tens) of marine robots (both on the surface and submerged) to interact by sharing information as a coordinated team (not only in pairs). The WiMUST system may be envisioned as an adaptive variable geometry acoustic array. By allowing the group of surface and submerged vehicles to change their geometrical configuration, an end-user can seamlessly change the geometry of the ”virtual streamer” trailing the emitter, something that has not been achieved in practice and holds potential to drastically improve ocean surveying. The project brings together a group of research institutions, geophysical surveying companies and SMEs with a proven track record in autonomous adaptive and robust systems, communications, networked cooperative control and navigation, and marine robot design and fabrication.