On the 26th-27th of November Arxipelagos.gr was at the city of Birmingham in the United Kingdom to cover the formal kick-off meeting of the Horizon Europe Project “MERLIN”. The kick-off meeting was hosted in hybrid format at the University of Birmingham campus in Edgbaston. “MERLIN” is a 4-year collaborative research and innovation project funded entirely by the European Union, with an overall budget of 8 million €.
The project, which is monitored by the European Health and Digital Executive Agency (HaDEA), will endeavour to demonstrate long-endurance intelligent multi-purpose autonomous vehicles for marine applications with artificial intelligence capability. The developed vehicles will be demonstrated during the final year of the project under three different mission scenarios.
The first mission will be undertaken at the OBSEA marine habitat observatory off the coast of Barcelona, Spain. This will be followed by a mission led by the Hellenic Centre for Marine Research (HCRC) at the crater of the underwater volcano Kolumbo in the Aegean Sea, just a few miles northeast of the picturesque island of Santorini. Finally, the third mission will be carried out at the Lithuanian Port of Klaipeda in the Baltic Sea, where port infrastructure inspection will be undertaken. Each of these missions has its own unique characteristics and complexities. Even though the project has just started, a great deal of work will have to be carried out to enable the demonstration of the prototype systems developed under actual operating conditions during the last year of the project.
The kick-off meeting has helped to adjust the tune within the consortium and set out the short, medium and long-term objectives for the different work-packages. The immense amount of knowledge gained during the H2020 ENDURUNS project will prove extremely valuable in moving forward the research agenda within the MERLIN project rapidly and on firm ground. According to Professor Mayorkinos Papaelias, Project Coordinator and Technical Manager of MERLIN, autonomous marine robotic systems will play a critical role in improving our understanding of our seas and oceans. Moreover, they will help us protect marine habitats whilst promoting the sustainability of the Blue Economy.