Twenty-five representative members of the DexROV consortium met in Brussels on 7 to 8 September for the six-month progress meeting. SpaceApps hosted the meeting, which focused on reporting each partner’s progress and solving issues for the steps ahead.
The Group was supported during the meeting by technical advisory board members Terry Fong from NASA Ames (USA), Thor Fossen from NTNU (Norway) and Bruce Blakeley from TSC Inspection Systems (UK), who stood in for Mike Smith. Christophe Canale, a veteran ROV field operations specialist also attended the meeting, providing valuable insight for the consortium.
“It is always a great pleasure to bring people together and have face-to-face discussions. Furthermore, opportunities to meet and align partners’ ideas about key technical and scientific issues are priceless in research and development projects,” said Jeremi Gancet from Space Applications Services and project coordinator for DexROV.
This is precisely why biannual meetings are held within the scope of the DexROV project – these gatherings are key to achieving the project’s objectives.
Critical developments during the meeting included trade-off discussion on the feasible concepts for the ROV control and perception subsystems, as well as the strategy for testing and validating the DexROV demonstrator in the next phases of the project.
The DexROV project will continue until 2018, when it culminates in a series of 1300-metre-deep tests in the Mediterranean Sea.
L-R Front row: Christian Mueller (JACOBS), Diego Urbina (SPACEAPPS), Gianluca Antonelli (ISME), Bruce Blakeley (advisory board member, TSC Inspection), Giovanni Indiveri (ISME), Daniela De Palma (ISME), Terry Fong (advisory board member, NASA), Pierre Letier (SPACEAPPS), Xavier Martinez (SPACEAPPS), Lisa Guilpain (EQ), Jeremi Gancet (SPACEAPPS)