INEST TEC is strongly committed to become a center of excellence in maritime technology and, in particular, deep sea technology. It is strategically located, with fast access to deep sea, it has been steadily building up its skills, capabilities and resources, and is presently in the process of implementing an open research infrastructure, thus preparing itself to become capable of providing services and open access to the European academic and industrial communities and, thus, become a recognized European maritime research asset. This proposal thus aims at creating solid and productive links in the global field of marine science and technology between INESC TEC and established leading research European institutions, capable of enhancing the scientific and technological capacity of INESC TEC and linked institutions (as well as the capacity of partnering institutions involved in the twinning action), helping raising its staff’s research profile and its recognition as an European maritime research center of excellence. These objectives will be fulfilled through a set of measures: summer schools; winter schools; short-term scientific meetings; Long-term Staff visits; Networking meetings; Workshops; Conferences; technology transfer workshops with stakeholders; and other dissemination activities. Therefore this proposal addresses the challenges raised in the call H2020-TWINN-2015. In particular, it takes INESC TEC, a top level Portuguese institution, and places it as the pivot of a network of excellence, involving four European Partners which are international leaders in deep sea technology. By tackling the call challenge with the specific topic of deep sea technologies, STRONGMAR is aligned with several National and European priorities (“The Portuguese Strategy for Smart Specialisation” (2014); Portuguese “National Ocean Strategy” (2013); EU Commission’s Atlantic Strategy (2011), etc.) establishing a consolidation path of INESC TEC's strategy in these areas.

The WiMUST (Widely scalable Mobile Underwater Sonar Technology) project aims 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 exploration and geotechnical applications. Recent developments have shown that there is vast potential for groups of marine robots acting in cooperation to drastically improve the methods available for ocean exploration and exploitation. Traditionally, seismic reflection surveying is performed by vessel towed streamers of hydrophones acquiring reflected acoustic signals generated by acoustic sources (either towed or onboard a vessel). In this context, geotechnical surveying for civil and commercial applications (e.g., underwater construction, infrastructure monitoring, mapping for natural hazard assessment, environmental mapping, etc.) aims at seafloor and sub-bottom characterization using towed streamers of fixed length that are extremely cumbersome to operate. The vision underlying the WiMUST proposal is that of developing advanced cooperative and networked control / navigation systems to enable a large number (tens) of marine robots (both on the surface and submerged) to interact by sharing information as a coordinated team (not only in pairs). The WiMUST system may be envisioned as an adaptive variable geometry acoustic array. By allowing the group of surface and submerged vehicles to change their geometrical configuration, an end-user can seamlessly change the geometry of the ”virtual streamer” trailing the emitter, something that has not been achieved in practice and holds potential to drastically improve ocean surveying. The project brings together a group of research institutions, geophysical surveying companies and SMEs with a proven track record in autonomous adaptive and robust systems, communications, networked cooperative control and navigation, and marine robot design and fabrication.