Providing engineering support to advance maritime research through successful at-sea experimentations: 60 years’ experience in CMRE facing evolving complex challenges and providing efficient solutions. A practical example

Providing state-of-the-art, at-sea engineering capability to advance maritime research has been for 60 years a day-to-day mission for the NATO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (CMRE). Along those years, CMRE has been demonstrating its excellence in such endeavor, gaining worldwide recognition and awards. Numerous scientific and technology breakthrough were achieved, that were carefully transitioned and are now in use within the NATO Navies. While at-sea experimentation remains a fundamental stage to validate and advance research in the maritime domain, well performing during maritime operations is not a chance, requiring extensive experience, and expertise in multiple complementary domains. Such multidisciplinary approach includes underwater acoustics, oceanography, electronics, mechanical and ocean engineering, through embedded and real time software and data management, up to the more recent domain of unmanned systems. The purpose of this paper aims at making aware the OCEANS Research Community, by means of a description of a recent at-sea experimentation, on how complex and how challenging it may be for a well experienced and dedicated engineering team to ensure the success of a scientific at-sea trial, Description of issues that had to be faced during the preparation and the execution of the sea trials are given. Solving them allowed the proper collection of calibrated and validated data sets, necessary for the Researchers to confirm and verify their models and algorithms. Some examples of the scientific achievements are given, to illustrate the relevance of the provided engineering support.