On July 11th 2020, the University of Dubrovnik and Regional Agency DUNEA participated in a marine litter clean-up action in Mali Ston Bay. This event has been organized by Dubrovnik Neretva County Public Institution for Nature Protection, as part of the ECOSS project. The exact demo site was Brijesta bay on Pelješac peninsula. Besides being the location with highly developed mariculture production, this site also falls under the area of the largest ecological network in the world – European ecological network Natura 2000.

On 10th of July, Subsea Tech received the SeaCat Unmanned Surface Vessel (USV) from the shipyard which manufactured the hull and integrated the propulsion. SeaCat will be used as the surface platform to deploy the Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and the two Remotely Operated Underwater Vehicles (ROVs) to locate and collect litter from the seabed and from the water column in the SeaClear project. This is a great step forward for the project as the team will now be able to work on hardware/software integration during the coming months. SeaCat is a 6.70 m long – 1.1 ton USV with 250 kg payload capacity and 7 days autonomy, able to embark, in addition to the ROVs, various sensors and tooling for coastal and offshore missions. SeaCat is housed in a purpose built new workshop at Subsea Tech seaside facilities in Marseilles.

On the 1st and 12th of June, our partners from University of Dubrovnik and the Laboratory for Intelligent Autonomous Systems (LIRIAT) performed initial investigations on the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) at two of the testsites we identified for the SeaClear project.

On June 16th and 17th 2020, SeaClear partners participated in a project meeting which was held online due to the situation with the corona virus. SeaClear initiative plans to develop first mixed system of Unmanned Underwater, Surface, and Aerial Vehicles - UUV, USV, UAV - to find and collect litter from the seabed and from the water column. The focus is on coastal areas since that is where waste inflow concentrates. At this meeting, coordinators of each work package provided an overview of the current state of implementation and instructed further tasks in order to comply with the planned schedule of activities. The next meeting is foreseen for September 2020 and should take place in Dubrovnik. Preliminary investigations of the pilot sites in Croatia, namely the island of Lokrum and Bistrina in Mali Ston Bay, has already begun by experts from the University of Dubrovnik. Planned meeting in September will be a great opportunity for other expert partners to also conduct initial demonstrations of currently available systems.