Fabrizio Del Bianco presented the European LIFE NatuReef project and its objective of protecting and restoring marine and coastal habitats at the Tech Summit 2024 in Ostia
Date:
On October 29-30, 2024, PROAMBIENTE participated in the 4th edition of the Sea Drone Tech Summit, the national conference on marine robotics, held at the Polo Acquatico in Ostia (Rome). Fabrizio Del Bianco presented the European project LIFE NatuReef and its objective of protecting and restoring marine and coastal habitats. Within this project, aquatic monitoring operations are conducted using the autonomous vehicle OpenSWAP.
OpenSWAP is the first fully Italian-made Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV), offering both remote and autonomous control for geophysical explorations, video inspections, and customized applications. Developed by the PROAMBIENTE laboratory of the Tecnopolo Bologna CNR in collaboration with CNR-ISMAR, it has been commercially available since 2019 and is designed to perform monitoring tasks in all aquatic environments, including the most extreme. The vehicle presented at the summit was equipped with a cutting-edge multibeam system for acquiring high-resolution bathymetric data of the seabed.
In the LIFE NatuReef project, OpenSWAP is tasked with monitoring environmental conditions at the mouth of the Bevano Stream (Lido di Dante) to support the design and development of a coastal nature-based solution: the creation of a bio-constructed reef that will be installed on a basal structure placed on the seabed and will grow autonomously.
The conference was attended by several key organizations, including research institutes, universities, units of the Italian Navy, start-ups, and private companies specializing in the investigation of aquatic environments using autonomous surface and underwater vehicles.
> Rewatch PROAMBIENTE’s presentation (minute 28)
