Last Thursday, on June 18th 2020, the UNEXUP consortium participated in a joint webinar with the Pipebots team. The talk covered various topics of both UNEXUP and the predecessor project UNEXMIN. During the two-hour talk, there were three presentations, followed by a “Questions and Answers” section at the end of the webinar.

The first presenter was the project coordinator of UNEXUP – Norbert Zajzon, who talked about his experiences in coordination of the projects, as well as about IPR (Intellectual property Rights) regarding the development of a joint technology. Norbert mentioned his criteria when selecting the team pillars – technology development, stakeholders and technology exploitation – that comprise the consortium partners, and emphasized the commitment of the consortium towards the successful outcome of the UNEXMIN project (2016-2019).

After that, Alfredo Martins, from the partner INESC TEC (technology development), showed the transition between the UX-1 robotic platform from UNEXMIN to the new prototype within UNEXUP. Alfredo mentioned some of the lessons learned from the UNEXMIN field trials, as well as some new functionalities and instruments that will be added to address the pre-identified issues, in order to improve the robot’s performance and reliability under the upcoming challenging environments where the surveying missions will take place in the near future.

Finally, the partners Ramón Suarez and Zorana Milošević, from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), presented about the guidance, navigation and control of the underwater robotic explorer UX-1. The presentations covered the software and hardware programming and testing, in order to improve the navigational and perception systems of the robotic platform.

There were 37 participants in the joint webinar, which was a great opportunity for the UNEXUP consortium to discuss about overall details of UNEXMIN and UNEXUP, as well as to share experiences with the competent team of Pipebots about the technology that is involved in the UX-1 based robotic system.

Is this a path for future collaboration?