Page 38: of Marine Technology Magazine (June 2020)

FEATURE Geophysical Seismic Survey

Graphic representation of the exercise; met-ocean data collection operations running concurrently with simulated threats, detection and mitigation assets.

Photo: ION the Port Police Patrol boat. AIS transmit- additional interesting data to analyse.

OngOing Challenges ters were used to track ‘friendly’ assets. “We were able to do this very quickly

It seems there’s more to come, and not

But, because the update rates during the during the exercise, leaning on our de- just from ION. “Underwater security exercise were slow, ION switched to us- cades of sensor and data fusion experience threat detection and mitigation still has ing GPS tracking, where it was available, in the oil and gas industry,” said Gentle. a number of challenges to solve in order through some “on the fy” integration. “The end result is that the team were able to provide a seamless and reliable solu- “There was a silty bottom (in the area) to successfully detect threats, monitor tion to the growing potential threats that and high turbidity,” said Gentle, “the their tracks and deploy countermeasures, are out there,” said Gentle. “A number of conditions were challenging. But the all coordinated through Marlin.” companies are working on this area and system detected real and dummy div- “For this exercise, Seiche’s engineers ION hope to be able to contribute using ers. Atlas Elektronik’s SeaFox was used built a prototype PAM (passive acous- the Marlin platform as the glue to tie it all to investigate the intruders and we also tic monitoring) array that was housed together.” ION specifcally is doing more used the Stringray net to capture the Re- on the AutoNaut USV,” said Gentle. “As work in this area, including providing a mus 100 and Riptide.” AutoNaut is capable of very quiet wave Marlin variant, called Marlin SmartPort,

All of this was coordinated through propulsion and is able to maintain sta- in ports for vessel tracking and port op-

Marlin, with the AutoNaut USV being tion and listen as we performed the port erations management. “This is a fairly used as a communications gateway to the security operations, they picked up some new area for us, but we are gaining trac-

UUVs, with control via a Woods Hole very interesting results in later post pro- tion working with our partners at the Port

Oceanographic Institute Acomm unit. cessing.” of Montrose (in the UK) and we working

In addition, the AutoNaut also collected with AWS on this cloud native version of a metocean dataset, which offered some the Marlin platform,” said Gentle.

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MTR