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solutions | Remote Operating Vehicle (ROV)
The University of South Florida's Center for Ocean Technology (COT) is one of the world’s foremost developers of innovative solutions addressing critical oceanographic challenges, especially port security. With support from the Coast Guard and the Navy's Office of Naval Research, COT turned to ComCam to help develop its breakthrough underwater sonar and video system, the Mobile Inspection Package (MIP).
The challenge COT faced designing the Mobile Inspection Package was to effectively integrate a suite of complimentary sensors with each other as well as a survey-quality navigation system. This integrated multiple sensor approach was to enable the user to take advantage of different sensors strengths in difficult environments, thus creating a 3-dimensiona data product that is geo-referenced, integrated and synchronized with imagery. MIP needed to detect objects as small as a foot in diameter, transmit 3-dimensional images and pinpoint their location in up to 100 meters (328 feet) of water. In addition, MIP data had to be available in real time, allowing for intuitive operator analysis.
ComCam’s proven hardware and software technologies provided the functionality, efficiencies and customization necessary to meet these challenges. Its size and weight performance plus low power requirements are unmatched, especially for mobile deployment. Equally critical, its seven I/O ports provided an easy means for multiple device and data integration. Further efficiencies were achieved through ComCam’s implementation of Wavelet compression for underwater sonar and video data capture, a methodology more effective than JPEG and MPEG. Perhaps most significant, ComCam’s easy programmability allowed COT to add a host of specialized analytic vectors – e.g., roll, pitch, yah (GPS can’t be used underwater) – for location tracking.
COT’s MIP was deployed to augmented security for the 2005 Super Bowl.