On the weekend of November 5-7, 2021, three ENSTA Bretagne students took part in the 6th Ocean Hackathon organized by the World Sea Campus (Campus mondial de la mer). The aim of the event was to get a multidisciplinary community to work for 48 hours on ocean-related data and to propose innovative solutions. Gabriel, Thomas and Charles were involved in a project to design a marine UAV with Pierre, a freelance engineer, and Nicolas, the Gabriel Air Services' project manager.
The challenge
The challenge selected by Gabriel, Thomas and Charles was entitled: “Using sea data and biomimetism to define the design of a maritime drone for environmental mission”. It was proposed by the Gabriel Air Services company.
The stakes
What was at stake was to design an autonomous robot capable of taking action quickly on a marine pollution site. Indeed, some ships carry out “illegal degassing”, i.e. they discharge fuel or other polluting products into the sea. Polluting ships are rarely convicted for such offenses as it is difficult to gather evidence.
Aims
The device developed by the team had two aims:
- Gathering an image of the area
- Gathering a sample of polluted water.
These elements are intended to identify the vessel, in particular through an analysis of the fuel, which will then be compared against that of the vessel stopped on its return to port. This device can also be deployed in the event of suspected oil spills.
Team proposal
We modeled an autonomous UAV (120 cm long) that can fly and dive (by retracting its wings) to gather samples. It was inspired, through the principle of biomimicry (imitating nature), by the gannet bird diving to catch fish.
The UAV can be deployed from a boat or dropped from an aircraft in the event of an emergency.
During this Hackathon, we were supervised by members of several companies including Ifremer. Sunday was devoted to preparing a 5-minute pitch to defend our project. We met professionals from Cedre, Ifremer, Météo France and SHOM.
The topics mobilized by the students were: robotics (Inertial) and hydrography. The jury particularly appreciated the presentation of the team that won 2 prizes: a visit of the city of Brest offered by the Tourist Office and a visit of 70.8 (gallery of maritime innovations in Brest).
