Seebyte's mine neutralisation program extended

SeeByte, a cutting edge software solutions company, has been awarded a $1Million contract extension through the United States Office of Naval Research (ONR), within its on-going Very Shallow Water (VSW) Mine Neutralisation (MN) programme of work. The extension follows on from discussions with project teams and user feedback from operators involved with the successful ONR project.

In the first phase of the existing programme, SeeByte was successful in demonstrating Automatic Target Recognition (ATR) and sonar servoing. The ATR was used to detect, track and classify bottom and floating targets observed using a BlueView Technologies imaging sonar. The sonar servoing was used to autonomously manoeuvre a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) and; using Through The Sensor Technologies, home the vehicle to a buoyant target in the water column. The extension to the current MN work will focus on producing an ‘operator in the loop' solution to the Mine Neutralisation problem where SeeByte's sensor processing and control capabilities will be merged with SeeTrack Topside and the iRobot Maritime systems (formerly Nekton Research) Transphibian vehicle. SeeByte will use SeeTrack Military to monitor and visualise the vehicle's progress and will provide an intuitive operator interface which will enable the user to control the vehicle using high level commands.

SeeTrack Military is a mission planning, monitoring, post processing and sensor fusion tool for rapid on-site analysis and intelligent decision making. Sensors include: sidescan sonar, imaging sonar, bathymetric, and video. It is a highly modular, equipment-agnostic system and is designed to perform on both notebook and desktop environments. The software is operationally used by the US Navy and provides the graphical interface for the US Navy's Common Operator Interface Navy

SeeTrack Military Product Manager Alastair Cormack said "We're very excited to be involved in this program of work in which the project teams are taking the experience & technology developed offshore and using it in military applications and vice versa. SeeByte is proud to continue supporting this work, towards the global safety objective across both sectors to ‘keep the man out of the water in dangerous situations".

SeeByte was founded in 2001 in Edinburgh, Scotland, with the objective of applying market-centered product management principles to world-class research outputs from the internationally recognized Ocean Systems Laboratory (OSL) at Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh. The OSL has a reputation of global excellence and is consulted by the world's leading operators in the offshore, military, marine science and transportation sectors. Founding CEO David Lane had the vision to radically improve underwater operations by combining and using streams of sensor-derived data from remotely operated assets within a single integrated picture. Turning such sensor data into actionable information thus improves situational awareness, and has enhanced the decision making and control performances of people and machines in multiple applications across some of the world's most extreme locations. By constantly improving its product capability and listening closely to market demands, SeeByte has been able to deliver on its promise of "Awareness Made Easy". The team has achieved steady growth by responding to industry-wide problems and embracing a philosophy of service excellence and the highest quality customer support. (www.seebyte.com)

In the Defence market, SeeTrack is being used by Navies around the world as the de facto standard smart software making small autonomous underwater vehicles, divers, marine mammals and other unmanned systems, sufficiently capable that organic capabilities can be used and deployed effectively.

In August of 2007 Cmdr Jon Wood USN (Ret) joined the SeeByte team full time to establish a permanent stateside customer facing presence for the US Government and Offshore Industry.