The protection of maritime infrastructure such as harbours, submarine cables, offshore wind farms, and pipelines has become much more relevant since the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine. Events such as the underwater detonation of the Nord Stream pipelines at the end of September 2022 show how vulnerable our infrastructure is and what impact acts of sabotage can have.

Real-time situational awareness is essential to protect the facilities. Conventional SONAR systems are used for this, but they are currently still mostly large, inflexible and expensive. This is now set to change, which is why Kiel University in cooperation with companies received funding totalling 1.6 million euros in September last year to advance research into a new type of SONAR technology with AI-supported signal processing.

In a podcast called ‘Chatbots and AI’, the CEO of the company assono, Thomas Bahn, talked to Gerhard Schmidt about how conventional sonar systems work and how they can be improved with the help of thin-film sensors and reinforcement learning. Details of the podcast and the audio part of it can be found here.