Underwater
Surveillance and
Port Security
Water Linked’s products can assist in providing precise navigation and positioning, detailed imaging, and reliable communication. They can work together with each other or with other external sensors and devices to support situational awareness, ensuring that your underwater environments are monitored and protected efficiently.
Accurate navigation is essential for underwater surveillance vehicles such as AUVs and ROVs to perform their missions effectively, stay on course, and avoid obstacles. Water Linked’s products can help you with both dead reckoning navigation (DVL) and acoustic positioning (UGPS).
Precise dead-reckoning navigation
Water Linked’s Doppler Velocity Logs (DVLs), like the DVL A50 and DVL A125, provide highly accurate velocity measurements relative to the seabed. Our DVLs have a built-in IMU (Inertial Measurement Unit) and can therefore provide dead-reckoning navigation for a relatively short period without the need for integration with other sensors.
For long-term dead-reckoning navigation, we recommend integrating our DVL with an external IMU/INS through our user-friendly API. The DVL is often used in combination with an INS and an acoustic positioning system to obtain the best possible estimate of an underwater vehicle’s velocity and position.
Photo courtesy of Boxfish Robotics
Photo courtesy of Boxfish Robotics
Inspect complex environments
Our DVLs don’t just help ROVs and AUVs with navigation. When integrated well with other sensors in an ROV or AUV, our DVLs can also:
- Increase the vehicles' control and stability
- Allow vehicles to hold position (station keeping)
- Help with automated navigation
Your underwater vehicles' increased capabilities are crucial for operations such as port security. Using our DVLs, you will now be able to navigate complex environments more reliably and monitor and inspect infrastructure more precisely and methodically.
Over longer distances, underwater vehicles' positioning will drift over time. By integrating an acoustic positioning system such as our UGPS it is possible to enhance your navigation solution.
Increase the precision of your security sweeps
Short Base Line (SBL) systems offer operators at the surface the ability to track their assets but can also provide a means for vehicles operating autonomously below the surface to better understand their absolute position, where there is a GNSS surface position. This additional input is useful for vehicles depending on navigation solutions that accumulate positional errors over time or distance.
You can use Water Linked’s SBL system, called UGPS, to increase the efficiency of your surveillance efforts. Effective surveillance requires the ability to monitor large areas with minimal effort, ensuring that potential threats are detected and their position is known. The UGPS system offers omnidirectional 360-degree coverage, ensuring that underwater vehicles or personnel can be tracked in all directions. The UGPS also reliably tracks targets in shallow water or near the surface, where many traditional acoustic positioning systems can struggle.
For example, during a security sweep of a large marina, the UGPS system can allow divers, ROVs, and AUVs to be tracked in real-time, ensuring that all areas are covered without overlap or gaps. The system’s ability to maintain communication even near the surface helps track divers and underwater vehicles as they inspect critical points just below the waterline, ensuring no blind spots in the surveillance effort.
Dependable communication for prolonged surveillance
The Water Linked Modem M16 ensures dependable data exchange between underwater assets and surface control centers, which is vital for continuous monitoring and command relays during surveillance operations.
The modem’s 1,000-meter acoustic range supports wide-area surveillance, while its low power requirement ensures extended mission duration for battery-powered vehicles, making it ideal for prolonged surveillance without creating excessive demand on the systems power source.
With a rapid boot-up time and 600m depth rating, the M16 modem is suitable for various environments, enabling quick responses to threats and versatile deployment in different underwater scenarios. Its small size and lightweight design allow integration with a range of vehicles and sensors, supporting flexible surveillance operations.
Assess risks with certainty, with our Sonar 3D-15
High-resolution imaging is essential for identifying, inspecting, and assessing underwater objects and structures, which is critical for security and maintenance operations.
The Sonar 3D-15 delivers clear, three-dimensional acoustic images of the underwater environment in real-time. With accuracte information on the position of the Sonar 3D-15, every 3D image the sonar produces can be used to build up a 3D spacial awareness model. With our 3D sonar you can see clearly in high turbidity environments, removing the need to guess what is around you and as the image is in 3D it removes the need for a skilled operator to interpret a 2D sonar image.
For example, consider a situation where a port authority needs to check for unauthorized devices attached to a ship's hull. The Sonar 3D-15, mounted on a small ROV, can, in real-time, create a 3D image of the hull, allowing operators to quickly identify and locate any suspicious objects, ensuring the vessel's safety before it departs.
The DVL's output was fused with other sensor data to deliver even more precise navigation and altitude control, enhancing our AUVs' ability to carry out operations and navigate with great precision.
- Craig Anderson, co-founder, Boxfish
Product features
Small size
Our sensors are all developed to fit on small vehicles as well as bigger ones, without compromising performance.
Light weight
Lightweight sensors allow fitment on lighter vehicles, and leave you with excess payload capacity for other equipment.
Low power consumption
Our smart, proprietary technology leaves more power for your other devices or can help free up payload capacity due to requiring
smaller battery packs.
Increase the efficiency and flexibility of your underwater surveillance operations
Flexibility in deployment and operational efficiency are key to successful underwater surveillance, particularly when rapid response and adaptability are required.
The small size and lightweight design of Water Linked’s products, make them easy to integrate into various platforms, from small ROVs to larger vehicles. Their low power consumption and rapid boot-up times further enhance operational efficiency.
Our products’ simple, user-friendly interfaces and seamless integration with existing systems are crucial for ensuring that surveillance operations run smoothly and effectively, with no need for specialized training.
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