Sends saildrone cruising in the North Sea

The Institute of Marine Research (IMR) is renting the saildrone from the American start-up Saildrone, which is taking the opportunity to test another drone in the North Sea at the same time. After being calibrated at the Port of Bergen, the two drones were towed out in to Korsfjorden, where their inventors and our researchers released them out into the open sea.

Same echo sounders as research vessels

– This is definitely one of the monitoring tools we will use in the future, says marine scientist Espen Johnsen, who is managing the drone project.
He explains that the saildrone will collect data in parallel with the IMR performing two traditional surveys in the same waters.

– It will be interesting to compare the survey data with those collected by the drone. One of the advantages is that the echo sounders on the drone are exactly the same as the ones on our research vessels. That means we can make use of the data without having to develop new methods of analysis, he says.

Effective and environmentally friendly data collection

Espen Johnsen doesn’t think that it will take many years for this kind of data collection to become an entirely normal part of the IMR’s research activities. There are many advantages: the drones are environmentally friendly, and they can, for example, cover bigger and shallower areas than research vessels. In theory, drones could be out collecting data for researchers continuously.

– The saildrone makes hardly any noise and it can get closer to fish than bigger vessels. In addition, it is easy to redirect the drone if it makes any interesting observations. Combining the drones with other hi-tech tools, like machine learning, for example, can make them even more useful to us, says Espen Johnsen.