The week of July 24 to 28, 2023, the first campaign at sea took place, more specifically in Cala del Vigatà in Sant Feliu de Guíxols, where several of the project partners, in this case, UdG, UPM, IQUA Robotics and UPC carried out the first tests of the different developments of the project to verify the interoperability of the different hardware and software components.
The first activities took place at the CIRS, the UdG Underwater Research and Robotics Center, where the UdG and Iqua Robotics groups have their facilities.
In summary, the objectives of the campaign were the verification of part of the electronic design, hardware and programming of the background stations, Landers, and surface proxy stations (UPC), the navigation of the Girona1000 underwater vehicle (UdG and IQUA Robotics) through its location referenced to the back-end stations and the development of firmware middleware (UPM) that implements the communications between the different devices and allows the interaction between them
After the pool tests at CIRS, Girona, for the following days, the team moved to the port of Sant Feliu de Guíxols, which would become the centre of operations for the rest of the campaign. From the port and employing two boats, the deployments of the bottom, surface and underwater robot equipment were carried out in Cala Vigatà to, in this case, carry out the tests in the open sea, in an environment much more similar to the final environment of the project, which are the marine protected areas (MPAs). Communications, file transfer, detection and geolocation tests of the vehicle’s background and navigation stations were carried out.
Photos: Matias Carandell, Joaquin del Rio, Daniel Toma.
