MASK - Marine Robots for better Sea Knowledge awareness


Final trials of MASK at the Breaking...

From September 29th to October 03rd, the second and final trials of the MASK project took place in Biograd na Moru, Croatia. The trials were part of the 16th Breaking the Surface (BTS), international interdisciplinary field workshop on maritime robotics and its applications.

Our event included educational robotics workshops and tests with different ROVs (maneuvering and orientation exercises, navigation missions, deploying and picking up objects with ROV manipulators, etc). As well, MASK is dedicated to environmental protection and one of the main objectives is to teach students on how to train Artificial Intelligence (AI) to detect and classify plastic bottles and face masks on the seabed. During this event the students labelled newly collected images and tested AI trained on images from the first year trials on the new data. 

The project was presented to a wide audience at the BTS (attended by 200 people) providing an excellent dissemination activity. Moreover, it also allowed the students not only to participate in the MASK trials but also to attend some of the lectures and learn more about maritime robotics from worldwide experts. During our “hands-on” session (in the official BTS program) all conference participants had the opportunity to learn from the students' experience and operate the ROVs under their guidance.

5 ROVs were used:
-         Blueye Pro
-         Blueye Pioneer
-         Qysea Fifish V6 Plus
-         BlueROV
-         Chasing Gladius

and Roboflow was used to train and test AI algorithms with great success. 

Author: Fausto Miguel Pascoal Ferreira
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