RV BELGICA CRUISE 2026/04

Description

This program covers several different scientific projects, funded by different entities (Royal High Institute for Defense, Walloon Region, European Commission), related to the new concept of naval mine countermeasures NMCM and Maritime infrastructure protection. Those projects mainly focus on the effectiveness of the monitoring survey, using unmanned autonomous systems simultaneously and remotely; and on continuously record video of sea state and traffic at sea during transit and during different measurements/maneuvers. These systems are expected to be equipped with state-of-the-art acoustic, magnetic or optical sensors and should be adaptable to different environmental and operational conditions.
A better understanding of the underwater environment is crucial for the autonomous operation of the different unmanned vehicles and for the evaluation of their sensor performance. Acoustical and geotechnical characterization of the seafloor are foreseen for planning and evaluation of NMCM, object burial prediction and to implement new techniques in naval coastal and harbor protection.
Different types of sensors will be considered: high-resolution low- and high-frequency synthetic aperture sonar, SSS, MBES, Sub-bottom profile, gradiometer. For validation, also ground truthing, penetrometer measurements and video imagery.
In addition to recording sea state using E/O cameras, this cruise will also be an opportunity to develop and validate methodologies for the reconstruction of wave fields in the immediate vicinity of a research vessel. Specifically it is aimed to exploit complementary sensing modalities: inertial measurement unit (IMU) data collected from RMA owned IMUs and visual data acquired from both shipboard and RMA owned cameras.

Period	2 Apr 2026 → 7 Apr 2026
Event type	Measurement campaign
Degree of Recognition	National