SUNBIO brings together a significant variety of disciplines, aiming at exploiting them to form a set of ‘technology enablers’ that will facilitate the delivery of the envisioned services through a holistic framework, comprising Underwater Engineering, Mathematics and Analytics, Computer Science, Archaeology, Chemistry, further decomposed in: (i) Naval engineering and design; (ii) trustworthy data analytics and relevant intelligence (ML/AI frameworks); (iii) Chemical measurement and spectroscopic methods for sensing, (iv) Navigation principles and compliance, (v) Communication and remote operation. These disciplines will be exploited to set up a number of complementary Technology Enablers (also described in detail in Sect.1.2.1-1.2.2); these enablers will be the basis for the SUNBIO envisioned services, that will lead to efficiently applied fully autonomous and in situ sensing, monitoring services. SUNBIO aims at ensuring that the pathway towards robust monitoring principles and practices, is designed always having ‘human in the loop’ in terms of usability and acceptance of deployed technologies, given the fact that trustworthiness is a key factor towards the exploitation of the envisioned set of services.

The proposition in this project is to use autonomous platforms for remote monitoring and chemical mapping of underwater heritage sites, such as AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles), BUOYs (Unmanned Surface Vehicles) and ROVs (remote operated vehicles). A swarm of self-coordinated AUVs will be responsible to monitor, survey and scan the heritage sites for detecting/identifying and monitor degradation, state of the UW surrounding site, possible intervention actions for alarming conditions etc. The swarm of AUVs will embed high edge processing capacity to support operational autonomy, dynamic path planning, dynamic sample-strategy planning and coordinated-swarming towards overall low energy consumption and long mission endurance, according to the project mission goals. The proposed swarming concept foresees building common underwater consensus of the cultural site, through periodic bilateral communication between AUVs to mutually achieve the overall common surveying goal; while the mother BUOY will be responsible to collect and deeply analyze raw AUV information to provide enhanced site situation awareness insights to the external human supervisor/user. Furthermore, the BUOY will be equipped with renewable solar collectors to ensure continuous power availability and reduced mission’s footprint, enough to support the overall mission energy needs (AUV will be periodically powered through BUOY). The supervisor/user will be located in a remote monitoring station, onshore, to allow periodic mission lifecycle management and general overview of the whole system situation based on real-time visual analytic mechanisms

To unlock and boost new discoveries that will be crucial to face climate change, and regulate human actives, which will be key for both environmental conservation and socio-economical activities. We aim to make all the past, current, and future biological and oceanographic data available to everybody. Therefore, we will use relevant sleeping data, by designing new tools and methodologies to use and process relevant data already collected for different institutions, which may come from physical and chemical sensors, or video cameras. We will also harmonize the data, promoting tools to make them the standard among researchers and data-generator actors, developing protocols and best practices, like standardization tools as PUCK among marine sensors and monitoring platforms, and unifying libraries and resources (e.g., FanthomNet or Emodnet). At the same time, we will ensure a secured, sustained and reliable data flows by developing auto correction/validation methodologies and by publishing a set of tools and pipelines to ensure the trustfulness of data. Moreover, we will be using economies of scale and enhanced standardization to conduct several pilot sea-basin scale monitoring tests using two strategies: (1) using existing relevant sleeping data form online and partner repositories, and (2) using new data collected during field test demonstrations. Here, we will develop tools to better support assessment: studying and identifying key indicators and mechanisms to extract them from the data will generate the appropriate guidelines for policymaker, researchers, and socioeconomic sectors. Making those tools, methodologies, and implementations open source for the researchers and public in general will boost their utilization and improvement, even after the conclusion of the present project. With these demonstration examples, the international collaboration, and open source resources, we aim to make our proposal by fact the standard gold to follow in the following years