The technical seatrials ESSCORAL 20 aims to perform the first at sea validation of the new 6000m rated AUV of Ifremer.

The development project of the new AUV started in 2015 and is financed by Ifremer, the French state, the PACA region and the European commission. The AUV is scheduled to enter service in the French Ooceanographic Fleet from 2021.

This new autonomous platform integrates several innovative solutions allowing it to best cater to the constatnly evolving requirements and challenges posed by the international scientific community. It will allow for high coverage (~100km) high resolution cartography and mapping capabilities, matching them with ultra high resolution low scale optical ground truthing in a wide range of  scientific domains (marine mineral and energetyic ressources, ecosystem caracterisation, geophysical science and surveys).

The new AUV offers enhanced performance and capabilities when compared to the state of the art in autonomous marine platforms.

Its intended exploitation within the French Oceanographic Fleet will be as a complementary exploration tool to be combined with the intervention capabilities offered by the other deep diving platform such as Nautile HOV and Victor 6000 ROV.

Once fully integrated and tested in pool and harbour (2019),  the ESSCORAL 20 set of sea trials will allow a full validation at sea of the key functionalities of the AUV, including:

• autonomous navigation and control;
• embedded management of ressources and systems diagnosis;
• positioning and geo-referncing system;
• data and control interfaces between AUV and support vessel;
• data acquisition module and payload management;
• mechanical tools for system exploitation and launch and recovery phases;
• operational procedures for all stages of the exploitation.