The GPS does not work under the sea

Only with depth and heading – geolocating ROV in the fish cage.

It is well known that the ordinary Global Positioning System (GPS) fails to provide location and time information underwater. The reason is that the electromagnetic signals from satellites are heavily damped in water. Ultrasound disturbs the fish in the cage.

KARMENstudio, for our Fouling ratio service, solved the issue of geolocating where the ROV is located and what part of the cage is observed each second.

How we do it?

We recommend the path for ROV inspection. It’s very similar to the usual strategies for net-hole inspections. We need the basic geometrical dimensions of each cage – height and circumference. KARMENstudio can reconstruct the geo-positioning only from the depth and heading value per each image extracted from the video. Each second of the video is 30 images for us. Each image is analyzed to calculate the Fouling ratio.

Each of those images is geolocated on the geometry of the fish cage. We used classical physics approaches to reconstruct the actual position of the ROV using very sensitive depth measurements and the physical model of precise heading geolocating. We know where the ROV camera is looking at KARMENstudios Fouling ratio solution is precisely locating every second of the inspection video. And objectively calculating how much fouling overgrowth is on each video frame/image.

No need for aditional equipment like hydroacoustic communication