The campaign performed in Ravenna will be devoted to capture operational benefits brought by PASSport in support to underwater threat monitoring providing a concrete contribution to improve security in port areas.

The demonstration will be arranged by using Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and aerial rotary wings drones acting as bridge for communication relay to the control center.

To this end, in the scenario of the port of Ravenna, FeelHippo AUVwill be endowed with a DL-based ATR software capable of autonomously detecting and localizing objects on the seabed in FLS imagery. Some similar experiments already took place, confirming this capability of the AUV: a first dataset to train the DL model was acquired in May 2019 in La Spezia, Italy, and, afterward, in October 2019, the trained model was validated during sea trials performed in La Spezia, Italy. In the testing framework at Ravenna, FeelHippo AUV will be physically connected to a small passive surface buoy able to communicate with a ground station and/or with other nodes of the relay network. The small buoy will be physically connected through Ethernet to FeelHippo AUV, permitting thus the communication while FeelHippo AUV will be underwater.

FeelHippo AUV will autonomously detect and localize the objects placed on the seabed (e.g., fake mines) during its inspection mission and the data streaming, available to the whole communication network, will involve, among other things: self-localization data of the AUV and the outputs of the ATR algorithm, together with raw images from optical cameras and the FLS.

Two scenarios will be proposed for the project:

1) Use of an AUV to detect and localize fixed objects on the seabed;

2) Use of an AUV to detect and localize moving objects in the water column by means of acoustic monitoring devices.