Esense project
The joint laboratory Esense Lab was launched when ELWAVE was created in 2018 by Pierre Tuffigo and his meeting with Frédéric Boyer, director of the biorobotics laboratory at the Institut Mines-Télécom Atlantique. The vocation of this joint laboratory is to allow the transfer to the industry of more than 10 years of research on electric sense technology, a biomimicry technology inspired by tropical fish for navigation, detection and characterization.
the project
Survey, inspection, maintenance, and repair (IMR) of offshore infrastructure are key activities for this industry. They are currently performed with costly subsea remote operated vehicles (ROV) and divers, with security issues. The deployment of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) represents the foreseen solution by the market for replacing ROV and divers. Using AUVs divide subsea survey and IMR operating costs by a factor of 10. To-date, AUVs do not fully comply with customer expectations due to a major setback related to the vision/perception sensor. They cannot operate safely and efficiently close to infrastructure without human supervision and thus cannot be deployed at a large scale.
Bluesense technology
ELWAVE’s BLUESENSE technology provides a unique real-time 3D 360 degrees perception of subsea environment. This enhanced capability is the key-enabling technology for safe and efficient use of AUVs. ELWAVE will also offer its solution for ROVs to equip submarine vehicles already in the market and to be included in the production of new vehicles during the transition period to the use of AUV for 100% of IMR offshore operations.
The ESENSE project (Blue Economy Window 2020 / European Maritime and Fisheries Fund) co-funded by the European Union will lead to the development and the qualification of 360 degrees real-time perception BLUESENSE plug-and-play sensors linked to features considered as essentials according to customer feedback: real-time 360 degrees perception for the massive and operational deployment of autonomous underwater vehicles (in particular AUVs), the development of a solution for the post-processing 360 degrees of perception data acquired for infrastructure contactless characterisation (corrosion, marine growth…) and the detection of buried objects (in particular UXO, cables, mines and plastic wastes).
