Last week, the first Kick-off Meeting (KOM) of the SMART-ME – Smart Monitoring of Marine Ecosystems project was held. This initiative, aims to establish a permanent and intelligent system for real-time ecological and technological monitoring in the deep Mediterranean Sea.
The project is coordinated by the Institute of Marine Sciences (ICM-CSIC) and focuses on understanding and monitoring recovery processes in newly established Mediterranean marine reserves, addressing one of the major challenges in marine science: achieving high temporal and spatial resolution in deep-sea ecosystem monitoring.
ViCOROB lead the SMART-ME TECH subproject, which focuses on advancing the autonomy and capabilities of the Girona Intervention Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (I-AUVs). Our research activities include:
- High-resolution seabed mapping
- Underwater manipulation for data retrieval and lander repositioning
- Autonomous detection and interaction with landers
At the core of SMART-ME is the creation of OBSEA-DEEP, one of the first distributed and intelligent deep-sea observatories in Spain. The observatory will be deployed at 400 metres depth on the upper slope of the Catalan margin, within a recently established no-take marine reserve between Blanes and Palamós. This strategic location will enable continuous monitoring across diverse habitats, providing unprecedented insights into deep-sea ecological dynamics in protected environments.
Unlike traditional cabled observatories, SMART-ME relies on a network of autonomous and cooperative robotic platforms, including multiparametric landers, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), and acoustic tagging systems. Data transfer will be ensured through pop-up buoys and a data-muling strategy enabled by I-AUVs, while the landers will be autonomously repositioned on the seabed, allowing adaptive monitoring in spatially heterogeneous environments.
By combining robotics, artificial intelligence and ecology, SMART-ME lays the foundations for a new generation of distributed and intelligent deep-sea observatories, contributing to marine ecosystem conservation while reinforcing Spain’s leadership in deep-sea research and technology.
