Underwater Intervention 2025 brought together the international community of underwater operations, robotics and intervention technology at the Ernest Morial Convention Center in New Orleans (USA), under the coordination of the Marine Technology Society (MTS), co-located with the International WorkBoat Show, through an intense technical program of lectures, demonstrations and workshops.
The Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands (PLOCAN) joined the event’s agenda with an institutional presence and technical activities aimed at showcasing its scientific capabilities and marine infrastructure services. Among the initiatives included in the program was the Glider School, through which PLOCAN contributes to the international strategy by promoting the development and use of cutting-edge ocean observation technologies.
In several technology-focused sessions, PLOCAN presented operational use-cases and results gathered with state-of-the-art autonomous platforms – especially its fleet of ocean-gliders (VIMAS) – focusing on procedures for scientific payloads integration, sensor calibration, and data quality criteria for systematic, more efficient and sustainable ocean observation compared to more traditional methodologies.
PLOCAN detailed procedures on mission setup to measure essential ocean variables (EOVs) —temperature, conductivity, dissolved oxygen, chlorophyll, turbidity and underwater noise— with periodic dives to maximum depths of ~1,000 m, and how these data flows feed operational models and products for marine management, emphasizing the importance of standardizing metadata and validation processes enabling data truly interoperable and exploitable by scientific communities and end-users based on FAIR standards.
PLOCAN’s participation also included interaction with technology companies, demonstrations on sensor integration, and dialogue with project operators within the international framework, highlighting the institution’s dual role as a provider of testing infrastructure and as an operational partner in Blue Economy value chains. The experience gained from recent missions served as the basis for practical discussions on key topics such operational risks, international logistics, and regulatory requirements.
The framework supporting these activities is the ThinkInAzul program, a joint R&D&I strategy in marine sciences that aims to integrate research, innovation, and knowledge transfer to promote the sustainable diversification of the Canary Islands’ economy in areas such as aquaculture and blue biotechnology. ThinkInAzul is developed as a Complementary R&D&I Plan in Marine Sciences approved by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and is funded by recovery instruments and public policies linked to the Recovery Plan (Next Generation EU / PRTR) and other regional/national calls for proposals that support the implementation and transfer of results. In this context, PLOCAN’s presence at events such as Underwater Intervention serves both as a technological showcase and as an internationalization mechanism for the products and services generated by ThinkInAzul.
