Seaber

SEABER designs and manufactures micro-AUVs, autonomous underwater vehicles small enough for multi-modal single person deployment. The company gives the core specification as navigation down to 300m depth with 8-10 hours autonomy, weighing 10kg and measuring 1m long. Its stated view is that the future of ocean exploration belongs to fleets of numerous small, agile, and affordable AUVs, and it built the vehicles to meet the specific needs of oceanographic researchers and navies. It works from Lorient in France and sells through a distributor network. There are two vehicle families. The YUCO is aimed at research and commercial oceanographic applications and comes in payload variants: YUCO-CARRIER as the base vehicle with options, YUCO-SCAN with side scan sonar and DVL, YUCO-CTD carrying a CTD RBR Legato, YUCO-PHYSICO with a multi-parameter AML sensor, YUCO-PAM with an acoustic recorder, YUCO-3DSS with 3DSS, YUCO-LUMEN with a high-resolution camera and YUCO-eDNA with an eDNA sampler. The MARVEL is directed at survey and more defense oriented sectors such as security, coast guard, MCM missions and ASW training, and is offered as MARVEL-SCAN with high definition sonar, MARVEL-MAGNETO with a magnetometer, MARVEL-MBES with a multibeam echosounder, MARVEL-3DSS and MARVEL-LUMEN, each available with USBL. Both families are planned and operated through SEAPLAN software, and the company groups missions as coastal monitoring and hydrography, inland waters and harbour work, marine biology and aquaculture, search, rescue, security and coast guard, mine countermeasures, and ASW training. The MARVEL-3DSS is the development described in most detail. It integrates a PingDSP next-generation interferometric 3D side-scan sonar into a vehicle just 12 centimetres in diameter with fully electric propulsion, which SEABER states is the first time worldwide such a payload has been miniaturized for a micro-AUV. Built on patented CAATI, or Computed Angle-of-Arrival Transient Imaging, processing, it delivers high-resolution 2D side-scan imagery, true 3D seabed reconstruction and centimetric-scale bathymetry in a single run. In operational testing a single MARVEL-3DSS mapped a 300 by 150 metre beach approach zone in around 30 minutes on three survey lines spaced 40 metres apart, working in 0 to 40 metres of water and returning a complete 3D model ready for mission planning tools, deployable by one operator from a rigid-hull inflatable boat with no hydrographic expertise required. The company is candid about limits: between 40 and 250 metres the onboard DVL can lose bottom contact, causing inertial drift that operators correct with intermittent USBL fixes from a surface platform at some cost to stealth, and 3DSS datasets impose heavy storage and post-processing loads. Integration required a redesign of the payload architecture with a dedicated data-flow management board, dual Ethernet interfaces and expanded onboard storage, validated jointly with PingDSP and Norbit across 2024 and 2025. Future work targets low-drift inertial navigation, embedded anomaly detection and adaptive acoustics for surf-zone conditions.