The Serafina project introduces

Schools of Small
Autonomous Submarines

to the underwater world. While each individual submersible might be equipped with a different set of sensors, they all share a common communication system.

This enables them to organize the school as a single entity (distributed control), to disperse locally sensed data to many submersibles (e.g. for the purpose of sensor data fusion), and to grow or shrink the current school.

Individual Serafinas are modular submersibles equipped with a variety of sensors, five independent thrusters, multiple communication channels, and a set of control architectures, which are implementing the localization, coordination, navigation, and mission control parts.

What can they do?

The list of benefits of the Serafina project can be broken down to the commercial application side, and the perspectives of scientific exploration

Commercial applications:

Searching
Exploration
Mapping
Monitoring
Inspection
...

Scientific exploration:

Exploration of unknown territory and marine life.
Seeking biochemical distributions and geological phenomena.

Small is beautiful?

Why small? (Serafinas are only 40 cm in lengths.) In case that the obvious limitation in payload does not pose a problem, a small submersible enjoys many advantages:

Easy handling (no winch, no crane, etc.)
Great robustness at reasonable costs
Low (or no) threat to operators and environment
Enhanced flexibility and speed of deployment.