More than one million tons of munitions dumped in the North and Baltic Seas during and after the two world wars posing a threat to both humans and the environment. So far, trained divers had to recover the ammunition. In the future, however, robots will take on this challenging and potentially dangerous task. The technologies required for this are being developed by the Robotics Innovation Center of the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI) headed by Prof. Dr. Frank Kirchner in the current CleanSeas project. Thanks to Artificial Intelligence, the robotic systems should be able to detect ordnance underwater and prepare its removal autonomously.

MARUM - Cen­ter for Mar­ine En­vir­on­mental Sci­ences at the Uni­versity of Bre­men is get­ting a new ROV. The new sys­tem has a higher per­form­ance than ROV MARUM-QUEST. This means that the diving ro­bot can be used, for ex­ample, to trans­port ob­ser­vat­or­ies to the ocean floor and con­duct in­vest­ig­a­tions at a wa­ter depth of 5,000 meters.

With the growth that the underwater defence sector has seen of late and the rapid increase in the number of nations planning to expend resources in this area, UDT 2017 which took place from 30 May - 1 June in Bremen, Germany, has again proven itself to be the premier global meeting place for undersea professionals, showcasing the vibrancy of this market.