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Abstract Optimisation of energy efficiency and operational performance as well as assessment of safety levels and emissions of marine operations require detailed information about the acting wave system. It is possible—with an analogy to classical wave buoys—to estimate the directional wave spectrum by processing sensor measurements of wave-induced responses (e.g., motions and structural responses) from a ship. Compared to other sources of wave data (e.g., buoys, satellites, third-generation wave models), estimation concepts using the ship itself as a buoy provide the wave spectrum at the exact spatio-temporal point, potentially increasing accuracy and with minimal associated cost. This paper gives an overview of the technology, discusses associated uncertainties, and highlights new developments made for estimating waves via measured ship responses.

Hyperspectral imaging is a powerful remote sensing technology, but its use in space is limited by the large volume of data it produces, which leads to a downlink bottleneck. Therefore, most payloads to date have been oriented towards demonstrating the scientific usefulness of hyperspectral data sporadically over diverse areas rather than detailed monitoring of spatio-spectral dynamics. The key to overcoming the data bandwidth limitation is to process the data on-board the satellite prior to downlink. In this article, the design, implementation, and in-flight demonstration of the on-board processing pipeline of the HYPSO-1 cube-satellite are presented. The pipeline provides not only flexible image processing but also reliability and resilience, characterized by robust booting and updating procedures. The processing time and compression rate of the simplest pipeline, which includes capturing, binning, and compressing the image, are analyzed in detail. Based on these analyses, the implications of the pipeline performance on HYPSO-1’s mission are discussed.

The HYPSO-1 satellite, a 6U CubeSat carrying a hyperspectral imager, was launched on 13 January 2022, with the Goal of imaging ocean color in support of marine research. This article describes the development and current status of the mission and payload operations, including examples of agile planning, captures with low revisit time and time series acquired during a campaign. The in-orbit performance of the hyperspectral instrument is also characterized. The usable spectral range of the instrument is in the range of 430 nm to 800 nm over 120 bands after binning during nominal captures. The spatial resolvability is found empirically to be below 2.2 pixels in terms of Full-Width at Half-Maximum (FWHM) at 565 nm. This measure corresponds to an inherent ground resolvable resolution of 142 m across-track for close to nadir capture. In the across-track direction, there are 1216 pixels available, which gives a swath width of 70 km. However, the 684 center pixels are used for nominal captures. With the nominal pixels used in the across-track direction, the nadir swath-width is 40 km. The spectral resolution in terms of FWHM is estimated to be close to 5 nm at the center wavelength of 600 nm, and the Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) is evaluated to be greater than 300 at 450 nm to 500 nm for Top-of-Atmosphere (ToA) signals. Examples of images from the first months of operations are also shown.

In 2007, a possible wreck site was discovered in Trygghamna, Isfjorden, Svalbard by the Norwegian Hydrographic Service. Using (1) a REMUS 100 autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) equipped with a sidescan sonar (SSS) and (2) a Seabotix LBV 200 mini-remotely operated vehicle (ROV) with a high-definition (HD) camera, the wreck was in 2015 identified as the Figaro: a floating whalery that sank in 1908. The Figaro is to our knowledge currently the northernmost wreck in the world to be investigated by archaeologists. As the wreck is protected by law as an underwater cultural heritage (UCH) site, only non-intrusive methods could be used during surveys. In this study, we demonstrate how using multiple complementary remote sensing techniques can be advantageous with respect to acquiring a holistic overview of a recently discovered wreck site. In January 2016, the wreck was revisited, and a full photogrammetric survey of the site was conducted with a Sperre Subfighter 7500 medium class ROV. In addition to stereo camera images, HD-video and underwater hyperspectral imagery was also obtained from the wreck site. In terms of data analysis and interpretation, the emphasis was in the current study put on the photogrammetric 3D model and the underwater hyperspectral imagery. The former provided an excellent general overview of the Figaro wreck site, whereas the latter supplied detailed information from a 14.65-m2 sub-area situated on the top of the wreck. By analyzing classified underwater hyperspectral imagery in context with supplementary information from the 3D model, the levels of biofouling associated with different marine archaeological substrate types were assessed. Our findings suggest that strongly protruding archaeological objects support significantly higher levels of biofouling than their surroundings, and consequently that high-density biological assemblages could serve as proxies for identifying human-made artifacts on the seafloor.

The present study aims at identifying the lowest number of fish (European seabass) that could be used for monitoring and/or experimental purposes in small-scale fish facilities by quantifying the effect that the number of individuals has on the Shannon entropy (SE) of the trajectory followed by the shoal’s centroid. Two different experiments were performed: (i) one starting with 50 fish and decreasing to 25, 13, and 1 fish, and (ii) a second experiment starting with one fish, adding one new fish per day during 5 days, ending up with five fish in the tank. The fish were recorded for 1h daily, during which time a stochastic event (a hit in the tank) was introduced. The SE values were calculated from the images corresponding to three arbitrary basal (shoaling) periods of 3.5 min prior to the event, and to the 3.5 min period immediately after the event (schooling response). Taking both experiments together, the coefficient of variation (CV) of the SE among measurements was largest for one fish systems (CV 37.12 and 17.94% for the daily average basal and response SE, respectively) and decreased concomitantly with the number of fish (CV 8.6–10% for the basal SE of 2 to 5 fish systems and 5.86, 2.69, and 2.31% for the basal SE of 13, 25, and 50 fish, respectively). The SE of the systems kept a power relationship with the number of fish (basal: R2= 0.93 and response: R2= 0.92). Thus, 5–13 individuals should be the lowest number for a compromise between acceptable variability (

This paper deals with the generation of sufficiently smooth position, velocity, and acceleration references for guiding the motion of an ROV along purposefully defined curvature-continuous paths in automated missions. The references are meant to be employed in high-performance trajectory tracking and dynamic positioning applications. The path planning problem is not in the scope of this work. A reference model that synthesises references concerning a single Degree-of-Freedom (DoF) motion is initially described. Then, the use of the synthesised references as the parametrisation for other references concerning multiple DoF motion along curvature-continuous paths is exploited. Results from computer simulations and full-scale sea trials, both based on the NTNU's ROV Minerva, are presented and discussed.

The Marine Systems Simulator (MSS) is an environment which provides the necessary resources for rapid implementation of mathematical models of marine systems with focus on control system design. The simulator targets models¡Xand provides examples ready to simulate¡Xof different floating structures and its systems performing various operations. The platform adopted for the development of MSS is Matlab/Simulink. This allows a modular simulator structure, and the possibility of distributed development. Openness and modularity of software components have been the prioritized design principles, which enables a systematic reuse of knowledge and results in efficient tools for research and education. This paper provides an overview of the structure of the MSS, its features, current accessability, and plans for future development.

This paper addresses the mathematical modelling and controller design of an automatic thruster assisted position mooring system. Such control systems are applied to anchored floating production offloading and storage vessels and semi-subs. The controller is designed using model based control with a LQG feedback controller in conjunction with a Kalman filter. The controller design is in addition to the environmental loads accounting for the mooring forces acting on the vessel. This is reflected in the model structure and in the inclusion of new functionality.

A dynamic positioning (DP) system includes different control functions for automatic positioning and guidance of marine vessels by means of thruster and propeller actions. This paper describes the control functions which provide station-keeping and tracking. The DP controller is designed using model-based control, where a new modified LQG feedback controller and a model reference feedforward controller are applied. A reference model calculates appropriate reference trajectories. Since it is not desirable nor even possible to counteract the wave-frequency movement caused by first-order wave loads, the control action of the propulsion system should be produced by the low frequency part of the vessel movement caused by current, wind and second-order mean and slowly varying wave loads. A Kalman filter based state estimator and a Luenberger observer are used to compute the low-frequency feedback and feedforward control signals. Full-scale experiments with a supply vessel demonstrate the performance of the proposed controller.

Todays model-based dynamic positioning (DP) systems require that the ship and thruster dynamics are known with some accuracy in order to use linear quadratic optical control theory. However, it is difficult to identify the mathematical model of a dynamically posititmed (DP) ship since the ship is not persistently excited under DP. In addition the ship parameter estimation problem is nonlinear and multivariable with only position and thruster state measurements available for parameter estimation. The process and measurement noise must also be modeled in order to avoid parameter drift due to environmental disturbances and sensor failure. This article discusses an off-line parallel extended Kalman filter (EKF) algorithm utilizing two measurement series in parallel to estimate the parameters in the DP ship model. Full-scale experiments with a supply vessel are used to demonstrate the convergence and robustness of the proposed parameter estimator.

A ride control system for active damping of heave and pitch accelerations of Surface Effect Ships (SES) is presented. It is demonstrated that distributed effects that are due to a spatially varying pressure in the air cushion result in significant vertical vibrations in low and moderate sea states. In order to achieve a high quality human comfort and crew workability it is necessary to reduce these vibrations using a control system which accounts for distributed effects due to spatial pressure variations in the air cushion. A mathematical model of the process is presented, and collocated sensor and actuator pairs are used. The process stability is ensured using a controller with appropriate passivity properties. Sensor and actuator location is also discussed. The performance of the ride control system is shown by power spectra of the vertical accelerations obtained from full scale experiments with a 35 m SES.