Photo courtesy MSubs Ltd.

by Scott Kesselman



BMT Isis, provider of safety and environmental risk management, and MSubs Ltd., supplier of manned and unmanned underwater systems, are collaborating to develop a fully instrumented maritime sea range in New Zealand to test unmanned vehicles.



“Unmanned underwater surface and air vehicles have been used extensively in military operations for many years but their application for commercial and humanitarian tasks has only recently started to come to the fore … ” says Mike Prince, managing director at BMT.



“Currently, however, there is no readily available U.K.- or E.U.-based facility capable of enabling command, control and tracking of multiple unmanned underwater, surface, and air vehicles in an environment where oceanographic and meteorological data can be monitored and recorded concurrently with the test,” says Brett Paneuf, managing director at MSubs.



The range will enable companies to fully test systems in realistic conditions with full control of test parameters. The range will include sensors on fixed buoys and mobile platforms including environmental sensors, sonar transducers, GPS and Wi-Fi for tracking, navigation, communications and data collection.