KORMARINE 2021 is the International Marine, Shipbuilding, Offshore, Oil & Gas Exhibition in Bexco, Busan, South Korea. The exhibition will take place from 19. – 21. October in a hybrid format, online and on-site. We will be taking part online and in collaboration with Switzerland Global Enterprise (S-GE) on-site who will represent us there. We are really excited to be part of this event and will hopefully see you there.
Tethys Robotics came back to Lake Thun, but this time at sunrise. The team arrived at 4:00 to make the Proteus ready to dive at 4:15 to witness the sunrise at 4:30. This early in the morning, the lake is very calm and silent. Only fishes bring movement to the water surface. Perfect circumstances to explore new places which would otherwise be crowded by boats, fishers or other people.
After some further development, Tethys Robotics had the opportunity to test the Proteus with the Swiss Military EOD team. The tests took place in Lake Thun where the EOD team already has some operations. The goal of the tests was to find the further features needed in Proteus to make the support for the EOD team more efficient. Furthermore, the localization system was tested in a real-world environment for the first time. The idea is to develop a sensor-fusion algorithm to combine our sensors and increase the accuracy of the robot’s positioning.
We did it! Tethys Robotics won one of the five spots in the newly renovated Büro Züri office. The office is located at the Innovation Park in Zurich where a lot of other Startups and innovative projects are encountered. This office will be available for free over the period of one year till the next batch of innovative Startups takes over the place.
In recent years, underwater photogrammetry has been introduced and even implementations of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) have been used to explore the underwater environment. Johannes Lienhart tackles the challenge of implementing underwater photogrammetry for use in Swiss lakes. Possible use cases of such a setup are the inspection of underwater structures and the investigation of the sedimentation process of the lake bottom. The project addresses the challenges associated with an underwater photogrammetry setup, particularly the poor visibility in Swiss lakes compared to other studies in marine environments. The main part of the project is dedicated to building the hardware, testing its basic functionality and interfacing it with the UUV Proteus from Tethys Robotics.
Bastian Schildknecht tackles the problem of 3D reconstruction of underwater environments by constructing point clouds from sonar images. Having access to accurate maps can often be crucial for many underwater operations. For that reason, a feature-based method for the estimation of landmark positions in 3D coordinates was built. This is done by feature extraction and feature matching on sonar images in order to acquire landmarks. These landmarks then get registered and integrated into the 3D reconstruction by using a novel iterative optimization method for estimating the landmark positions. To verify the performance of the reconstruction method, the self-developed sonar simulator with a synthetic data set is used.
