World’s Biggest Ocean Technology Event Open to the Public
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World’s Biggest Ocean Technology Event Open to the Public

Ocean Business 2019, the world’s biggest ocean technology event this year, has just opened its doors to welcome visitors from all over the world. The show is a global stage for the latest sea technology innovations. Ocean Business will take place from 9-11 April 2019 at the National Oceanography Centre, Southampton, UK.

Unmanned boats and underwater vehicles

Cheri Arvoni, Ocean Business event manager, said "There is no doubt that sea technology this year is dominated by unmanned boats and underwater vehicles. In fact, we had to build an extra floating pontoon to accommodate all these products at the show. Two local companies, Sonardyne and L3 Technologies, will be demonstrating a world-first combination of Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) and Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) technology on the dockside.”

Underwater inspection

With over 5,000 visitors expected at the show, from more than 65 countries, Portchester based L3 Technologies and Yately based Sonardyne have worked together to present advanced combinations of ASV and ROV technologies. Their products offer a solution for underwater inspection in the most dangerous coastal or offshore environments such as hazardous oil and gas surveys, environmentally challenging scientific missions, or for military and security purposes.

Remote control demonstrations

The companies will be offering dockside demonstrations to show how missions can be conducted entirely by remote control. L3’s unmanned surface boat, a C-Worker 7 ASV, will demonstrate how it can deploy and operate an ROV to carry out underwater inspections and measurements. In this case, the demo will show a vertical and horizontal subsea inspection of Empress Dock in Southampton. Sonardyne will be showcasing their sophisticated tracking and telemetry control software, as well as solutions for navigation and data recovery in unmanned over-the-horizon operations.

Subsea communications

Sonardyne recently streamed the world’s first live broadcast direct to global audiences from underwater submersibles in Seychelles using its subsea communications technology Blue Comm. This was broadcast by Associated Press, Sky News, and Sky Atlantic, in effect enabling the general public to join the scientists in a mission to explore the least known areas of the Indian Ocean as part of the Nekton Deep Ocean Research Institute’s First Descent expedition.

Unmanned surface vehicle

With over 360 exhibitors at Ocean Business this year, there are a multitude of other demos of unmanned surface and underwater vehicles from international companies including Kongsberg Maritime who will be showcasing their GeoPulse Sub-Bottom Profiler Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), designed to map the geology of oceans; and dotOcean with their Cloud linked Autonomous Surface Vehicle technology to control multiple ASVs (forming ASV 'swarms’).

Details can be found at www.oceanbusiness.com.

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