Project ORACLES, led by Robosys in partnership with ACUA, MSEIS, Plymouth Marine Laboratories, and OREC, seeks to transform the environmental consenting process for offshore wind farms (OWF), particularly in areas like the Celtic Sea, which can take up to 48 months, creating significant delays and increased costs for developers. One reason it takes this long is the requirement for large amounts of data from OWF sites, currently collected manually by a single provider, e.g., one solution for bird monitoring, and another for sea conditions. Data is evaluated after delivery to shore, not in real-time. OREC's ACORD project identified a critical need for advanced technologies like marine robotic systems to collect diverse data using sensors such as eDNA, ADCP, and acoustics, to monitor marine life, water quality, and environmental changes more cost-efficiently and at scale. ORACLES will address this by developing and deploying advanced marine robotics and digital ocean technologies that can accelerate data collection, reduce costs, and maintain high environmental standards whilst reducing CO2 emissions. The project will develop the autonomous dynamic positioning (DP) systems and automated ballasting for ACUA's Uncrewed Surface Vessels (USVs), and a beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) profiling winch capable of launching and recovering multiple environmental sensor payloads from the USV. This will improve the consortium's offering as the USVs will host multiple sensors for holistic data collection. These innovations will reduce the need for multiple crewed survey missions and enable a faster, more cost-efficient consenting process for OWF projects through the collection of more cohesive and comprehensive datasets. The technology will also significantly reduce environmental disturbances and carbon emissions compared to conventional crewed vessels, aligning with clean maritime goals. ORACLES will have a direct impact on the marine and maritime innovation cluster in the Great South West. Through collaboration between local partners and industry leaders, the project will enhance the region's expertise in marine autonomy, clean maritime, and digital ocean technologies. This will strengthen the cluster's role as a hub for maritime innovation, creating high-skilled jobs and contributing to the economic growth of the region. Commercially, the project's outputs will have potential in the rapidly growing UK offshore wind sector, as well as in international markets across Europe, Australia, and the United States. These innovations will unlock new business opportunities for environmental monitoring, OWF development, and scientific research, supporting the government's Levelling Up agenda and driving economic growth in the Great South West.

MSEIS has developed their in-house underwater towed array, a device commonly used for marine mammal and environmental monitoring operations during offshore development or exploration. This type of monitoring operation is often strictly stipulated in offshore development licensing around the globe, to ensure the protection of marine mammal and other acoustically sensitive marine life from the impact of noise. The manufacturer is required to provide performance metrics for the equipment used to provide evidence in their specifications. This project aims to develop a system to perform in-house calibrations of hydrophone arrays in the frequency range 200 Hz to 2 kHz, a range known to be difficult to measure under free field conditions due to the extreme length of acoustic wavelength underwater. The proposed development involves a water-filled cylindrical chamber utilizing standing wave principles for uniform pressure calibration of underwater hydrophones. This technique aims to offer supplementary calibration at covering the 200 to 2000 Hz intermediate frequency range for comparison calibrations thus enhancing confidence and traceability, and supplementing data from readily available air pistonphones at frequencies below 250 Hz and from free-field measurements in tanks at kilohertz frequencies.

Our consortium, led by MSeis and with expert support from technical partners HydroSurv and Chelsea Technologies is spearheading a groundbreaking initiative that is set to deploy clean marine robotics technology to deliver scale water quality monitoring services. Our mission, set to transform the way public understand our water ecosystems in three key ports and harbours within the South West, will provide widespread and accessible data relating to pollution in our rivers and estuaries. Driven by an urgent need to address pressing public concern about water quality standards, particularly in the wake of rainfall events, the project team will provide regular, timely and widespread spatial data using resident USV platforms based at Dart Harbour, Port of Plymouth and Falmouth Harbour. The Great South West region, with its rich maritime heritage and strong economic tie to tourism, fisheries and recreational marine, serves as an ideal testing ground for the pilot, strengthening the region's reputation for maritime technology innovation. The end-to-end system, consisting of a specialist sensor payload from Chelsea Technologies, integrated into MSeis fleet of HydroSurv USVs will surpass current monitoring techniques by providing expansive data collection within inland waters as a part of a frequent weekly service. HydroSurv will develop a cloud-based geospatial data viewing platform serving up to date water quality data to users across the region with timely and accessible information.

MSeis provide towed hydrophone arrays for use in noisy offshore environments to help mitigate against the harmful effects of industrial noise on cetacean species in compliance with guidelines from bodies such as JNCC, IBAMA, BOEM etc; whales, dolphins and porpoise. In order to do this effectively we require hydrophone elements that will respond to marine mammal vocalisations across the full frequency range, this is generally accepted as 1Hz-150 kHz. To prove this frequency response we test both newly manufactured and arrays returning from the field in a pool using a speaker with a controlled sweep through the entire frequency range. This can be seen as quite a subjective process as no figures are obtained from the test, we do, however, see it as the basis for an improved testing method. With our partner NPL we would like to quantify this response more accurately. The proposal is to provide better low frequency sound generation through amplifiers and specialist speakers. To create a methodology for elements situated along 10m of cable that can placed accurately and repeatedly for consistency of integrity and calibration against a known reference. This will involve the development of specific procedures and rigging designed around our array configuration. The rigging will take the form of measurable XYZ gantry to deploy reference and test hydrophones into the pool with ability to perform more accurate alignment for improved underwater measurement. Computational methods to understand how to implement and understand the results. This will hopefully lead to some basic computerised automation. In simple terms we will use a calibrated hydrophone to determine it's response to our various sound sources; this will then act as a reference so that we can then gain calibration readings for the array by comparison to the calibrated hydrophone device. This in turns provides the absolute sensitivity of the hydrophone which provide much reliable information of our arrays performance. In addition MSeis plan to use knowledge and instruction from NPL to create a variable frequency pistonphone type arrangement to test hydrophone element response at lower frequencies ideally 0-350 Hz which is hard to do in a relatively small pool. At the end of the project we will be able to test the integrity of all 4 hydrophone elements in an array. This will give our clients the confidence to prove detection capability of endangered species such as Northern Right Whale and Pygmy and Dwarf Sperm whales.