Page 38: of Marine Technology Magazine (May 2011)

Marport Deep Sea Technologies Inc. is the largest sonar company in Canada with 120 employees and operations in St. John’s, Newfoundland and in Cornwall, Ontario

Canada, as well as in the USA, France, Iceland and Spain.

It develops and manufactures sonar products for under- water defense, ocean survey and science and deep sea fish- ing applications. Marport is the originator of the software defined sonar (SDS) processor, a software-centric sonar architecture implemented on reconfigurable embedded hardware.

In 2006 the company, in collaboration with the

National Research Council of Canada (NRC) and

Memorial University of Newfoundland, embarked on the development of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) as a test platform for sonar systems under devel- opment and, later, as a product in its own right. The first version was developed as a subsea survey tool and the design is now evolving to a vehicle capable of advanced military mine countermeasures (MCM) work. The first version is a compact, medium weight AUV that uses a ver- tical twin-pod configuration, based on the Woods Hole

SeaBED AUV concept, and is designed for inspection and mapping applications in waters down to 500 meters in depth. A large vertical separation between the center of gravity (CG) and center of buoyancy (CB) afforded by the twin pods provides a passively stable platform optimal for 38 MTR May 2011

Conceived as a Commercial Survey Tool, Evolving to a Mine Countermeasures Platform, the Marport SQX AUV and its Application in the

Subsea Battlespace

By Karl Kenny, CEO, Marport Deep Sea Technologies Inc.

Marport’s Karl Kenny on hand for in-water testing of the SQX AUV.