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ECA Group announces a new sale of its autonomous underwater vehicle AUV A18
Thursday, September 20 2018
ECA Group announces a new order for its autonomous naval drone AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) from the range A18. A large depth version of this AUV dedicated to commercial applications of underwater inspection and cartography will be delivered to the customer by end 2019.
It is a third A18 AUV produced by ECA Group following a sale announced in 2015 (see press release published in March 5th, 2015).
This third AUV A18D can fulfil over 24hours missions and operate up to 3000 meters depth. It will be used for hydrographic and geological surveys or oceanographic research, in the context of the exploitation of natural resources at sea, for inspection or mapping of oil fields or for search of objects and rescue (SAR).
The sales price of the A18 AUV ranges from 1,5M€ to 5M€ depending on options and embarked sensors.
AUVs are being used more and more by sea professionals to obtain high quality underwater data, while ensuring safety for their crews and reducing logistics and maintenance costs.
The A18 AUV range integrates experience gathered during 20 years of AUVs developments such as ALISTAR, DAURADE, A9 and A27 as well as users’ feedback from several tens of sales. The A18 AUV benefits from ECA Group’s 50 years long experience in submarine robotics producing several hundreds of underwater robots such as one of the first worlds 6000m AUV, the EPAULARD, developed for IFREMER in the 1980s.
About AUV A18
With its A18 AUV range, ECA Group has developed a family of AUVs as a best balance for compactness, endurance, performance, modularity, innovation and competitiveness.
The A18 range:
- Covers depths up to 3000m,
- Has a great navigation precision and an outstanding stability allowing to obtain high resolution images precisely georeferenced
- Fulfils defense and security missions as well as missions for civil applications such as inspection or cartography
- Integrates best high-performance sensors and specifically SAS (Synthetic Aperture Sonar) for underwater detection
- Is equipped with a docking system for an automatic recovery
- Can be deployed from a USV (Unmanned Surface Vehicle) thanks to its compactness
- Has a modular design in order to be adapted to needs and technology innovations.
- Can be easily integrated within supervision and management of an UMIS™* mission.
Equipped with state-of-the-art interferometric SAS sonar, A18 AUVs provide high accuracy detection and quickly explore large areas.
A18 AUVs are equipped with decision-making autonomy modules depending on usage. An Automatic Target Detection (ATD) is used to automatically detect and sort objects in underwater clearance. Navigation modules using landmarks recognition allow navigation registration thus improving significantly the accuracy of data positioning. . An obstacle avoidance system allows the AUV to detect and avoid obstacles such as cables, rocks ...
The A18 integrates into the ECA Group UMIS ™ system or any other third-party system. Under the supervision of UMIS ™, the A18 can collaborate on the same mission with other ECA Group drones (AUV A18 or A9, USV, ROV identification ...) and thus benefits from all the advantages of a complete system allowing to manage the entire robot mission, even of several robots in parallel, to plan or quickly change the mission of the drone, to centralize the data and to treat them in real time and even in an automatic way.
*UMIS™ by ECA Group: Unmanned Maritime Integrated System - Naval robot system developed by ECA Group to ensure the safety of maritime areas. UMIS includes a combination of robots of different types (USV, ROV, AUV, UAV) as well as a complete software suite for robot mission command and control as well as the management and processing of collected data.
