A robot submarine designed in Portugal will be exported to Brazil, through a contract now signed with a consortium of Brazilian companies, said the Institute of Systems and Computer Engineering of Porto (INESC Porto), responsible for the development of the project.
The contract, valued at 1.6 million euros and valid for the next three years, provides for the creation of an “autonomous robot submarine capable of inspecting dam structures and basin silting”, details the Portuguese institution.
If those responsible for the project are explained, the structure will automatically collect information from the dams, allowing the early detection of anomalies and the analysis of the risk level with greater precision and less costs than traditional processes.
The inspection system, to be developed over the next three years, will be based on a similar robot, Mares, created by INESC and adopted by Águas do Oeste for monitoring submarine outfalls.
The new robot should allow not only the collection of data on water quality and the morphology of the watershed, but also images, as well as enabling real-time inspection. The objective is that monitoring tasks will be carried out more frequently and less costs, avoiding accidents.
Contacted by TeK, INESC provided a concept image of the submarine, which we reproduce below.
