Report

Teaser, summary, work performed and final results

Periodic Reporting for period 2 - MarineUAS (Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Systems for Marine and Coastal Monitoring)

Teaser

MarineUAS OverviewMarineUAS is an EU-funded doctoral program to strategically strengthen research training on Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Systems for Marine and Coastal Monitoring. It is a comprehensive researcher training program across a range of partners in several countries...

Summary

MarineUAS Overview

MarineUAS is an EU-funded doctoral program to strategically strengthen research training on Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Systems for Marine and Coastal Monitoring. It is a comprehensive researcher training program across a range of partners in several countries designed to have high impact on the training of individual researchers and their knowledge, skills and their future careers. MarineUAS has established a unique cooperative environment. It takes benefit of the partners\' extensive and complementary knowledge, field operational experience, and experimental facilities. Marine UAS will build a solid foundation for long-term European excellence and innovation in this field by sharing research infrastructures for field testing and disseminating the research and training outcomes and best practice of MarineUAS into the doctoral schools of the partners, as well as by fostering long-term partnerships and collaboration.

Why MarineUAS?
European countries have vast coasts and economic zones that go far into the Atlantic and Arctic oceans and are challenging to monitor and manage. The need to protect and manage the vulnerable natural environment and marine resources in a sustainable manner is an important policy that is manifested in European legislation such as the European Strategy for Marine and Maritime Research. Moreover, the drive towards activities in more remote locations and harsher environment demands new approaches and technologies. A key enabling technology is the increased use of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle systems (UAS) instead of manned aircraft and satellite-based remote sensing, oftentimes exploiting strong collaborative links with buoys, ships and autonomous marine vehicles for in-situ observations. UAS offers potential advantages such as high endurance, reduced cost, increased flexibility and availability, rapid deployment, higher accuracy or resolution, and reduced risk for humans and negative impact on the environment.

Doctoral training in MarineUAS
MarineUAS will recruit and train doctoral fellows via a specially developed and unique training program designed on the EU Principles for Innovative Doctoral Training. Expanding on the existing doctoral programs it combines cutting edge training-by-research, high quality supervision, complementary and transferable skills training, secondments, hands-on UAS operator training, cross-disciplinary skillset, and a series of network-wide training events that cover UAS technology, rules and regulations, operations in non-segregated airspace, air traffic management, marine and coastal monitoring and science, and the integration of the air, surface and underwater segments.

Work performed

\"During the two first years of the four year program, the focus has been on recruitment, network-wide training events, and individual training and research within the doctoral schools.
The following network-wide training events have been completed:
Internal research review, by FADA-CATEC
UAS Technology Workshop, by FADA-CATEC
UAS Operator Training, by NORUT
Remote Controlled and Autonomous Measurement Platforms Flagship (ReCAMP) Workshop, by NORUT
Marine and Coastal Surveillance Workshop, by Maritime Robotics
Ethics workshop, by NTNU
Entrepreneurship workshop, by Maritime Robotics and NTNU
Marine and Coastal Science Workshop, by IMAR, IST-Lisbon and University of Porto

The individual research projects of the ESRs:
Wenz, NTNU “Fault tolerant control and automatic de-icing for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)”
Olofsson, NTNU “Multi-UAS iceberg detection, tracking and motion prediction”
Rodin, MR “Intelligent data acquisition in maritime UAS”
Hovenburg, MR “Modular design framework for RPAS operating in marine environments”
Salazar, USE “Multi-UAS planning and trajectory generation for safe long duration missions”
Balampanis, USE “Distributed approaches for coverage and tracking missions with multiple heterogeneous UAVs for coastal areas”
Du, LIU “Model-Based diagnosis for UAVs”
Jain, UPORTO “Cooperative Control of UAS for distributed monitoring with logic-based communication”
Braga, UPORTO “Coordinated control for UAS integration in maritime operations”
Sabetghadam, IST “Cooperative motion planning and adaptive ocean sampling strategies: Cooperation between air and marine vehivles”
Hung, IST “Cooperative compliant ASV/AUV formation control for coastal area surveys under stringent communication contrains: Cooperation with UAS”
Gomola, Honeywell “Detect & Avoid (D&A) for Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems”
Faria, FADA-CATEC “Advanced navigation for inspection of offshore infrastructures using UAS”.
Andrade, NORUT \"\"Sensor-based formation flights with discontinuous sensor data applied to ice monitoring.\"\"\"

Final results

The main impact of an Innovating Training Network is the excellence in training of researchers such that their future careers will enable them to make important contributions to the society. Unmanned aerial systems (UAS) is a technology of the future that is expected to lead to increased efficiency and new capabilities for industry, commercial applications, consumers and government agencies.

The progress beyond state-of-the-art is best measured by the resulting publications are reported in MarineUAS publication database: http://www.marineuas.eu/publications

Several additional potential impacts should also be mentioned
- Maritime Robotics AS has initiated the development of a new Unmanned Aerial Vehicle driven by their MarineUAS fellow’s research. This research aims to contribute to both the research community and industry by offering new technologies that enable small unmanned systems to safely operate in the maritime and arctic regions. An impact of MarineUAS is that Maritime Robotics have significantly strengthen their R&D capacity with the recruitment of two fellows contributing to the long term development of their knowledge and products.
- NTNU and UPORTO have signed a MOU on joint doctoral degree and education in 2016. It is expected that the MOU will evolve into an agreement resulting in new joint doctoral degree programs in the field of MarineUAS as well as other fields.
- FADA-CATEC: Marine-UAS gave us the opportunity to be competitive enough at the European level increasing the number and diversity of applicants that we usually have. They were able to hire someone with more international experience that we usually get.
- NORUT has expanded its UAS research portfolio to include payload sensor feedback navigation.
- Honeywell is working in various projects on detection of fixed and moving objects to safely avoid them. The results of these projects will be used for different platforms including UAVs, helicopters and commercial aircraft. The work of MarineUAS student is well aligned with these objectives.
- UPORTO have just started a research group on Optimization for Ocean Operations. The Marine UAS students will be involved in this research group.
- NTNU\'s center of excellence on Autonomous Marine Operations and Systems (NTNU-AMOS) has been strengthened by the capacity, competence, national and international collaboration enabled by MarineUAS

Website & more info

More info: http://www.marineuas.eu.