Geotechnical Surveys with Cooperative Autonomous Marine Vehicles: the EC WiMUST project

Abstract

The H2020 WiMUST (Widely scalable Mobile Underwater Sonar Technology) project aimed 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 ocean exploration and geotechnical applications. The paper includes a brief overview of the WiMUST project and a short description of the final experimental results at sea obtained with a group of 7 autonomous marine vehicles equipped with two acoustic sparkers and streamers with hydrophone arrays.