Blue RoSES aims to develop innovative services that adapt marinas and leisure boat design to changing customer demand. By integrating robotics and IoT, these new services will result in creating job opportunities and new business models. Customers will be enabled to visit underwater sites by piloting a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) from a leisure boat, ground control room or web app. This will facilitate access to the subsea environment by the elderly and young people alike, thus adding a “new dimension” to marinas and attracting increasing interest from diversified users. The project will thus foster the design of innovative leisure boats that integrate robotic vehicles with ever-improving ICT services. The project will also address environmental challenges since ROVs will be used to monitor water, seabeds and yacht hulls for safer refitting and dismantling.

The Blue RoSES Lab will coordinate the collective endeavour of a multi-disciplinary team of young researchers and senior experts in marine robotics, IoT services for marinas and yachting, market intelligence and business. Innovative services and related business models will be identified through stakeholder-driven discussion and will be developed by the project partnership, which comprises research institutions, universities, SMEs and industrial clusters. The team will design, implement, and integrate the robotics & IoT infrastructure required to create innovative services, that will be evaluated through a couple of pilot actions on remote access to tourist underwater sites and waters and seabed monitoring inside marinas.

The partnership’s multi-disciplinary competences and international relationships will support the promotion of Blue RoSES innovative services to stakeholder groups, e.g. marine protected areas, Blue Growth technology clusters, platforms for technical and political cooperation, marine literacy institutions. The West Med assistance mechanism supports the proposal.