Breaking the Surface

07/10/2026

Newsletter with all the reminders is out, check it out!

05/10/2026

🌊 How do Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) navigate the ocean's depths with extreme precision?

Join us at for a talk by Itzik Klein on "Neural-Aided Strategies for Seamless AUV Navigation."

Navigating challenging underwater environments without reliable GPS is one of marine robotics' biggest hurdles. In this session, Itzik will break down the transformative role of Artificial Intelligence in underwater positioning, detailing AI-aided navigation algorithms and emerging trends in the field.

🔗 Read more about the session and speaker: https://bts.fer.hr/session/neural-aided-strategies-for-seamless-auv-navigation/

Imagine an autonomous underwater vehicle exploring the ocean’s depths. What’s the secret behind its incredible ability to know exactly where it is and navigate complex environments with such accuracy? The answer lies in the transformative power of artificial intelligence-aided navigation. This t...

28/09/2026

🌊 How did early humans navigate open oceans 65,000 years ago? 🧭

At Breaking the Surface 2026, Dr. Helen Farr will take us on a journey into deep time to explore early human seafaring between Sunda (Island Southeast Asia) and Sahul (ancient Australia & New Guinea). 🌏✨

By integrating marine archaeology, seismic data, and oceanographic modeling, the ERC ACROSS Project reveals submerged palaeo-landscapes, past sea levels, and ancient winds and tides to answer fundamental questions about early human movement across our oceans.

👉 Read the full session details and join us: https://bts.fer.hr/session/multidisciplinary-approaches-to-studying-seafaring-in-deep-time/

Maritime Archaeology, including both tangible and intangible maritime cultural heritage, creates a nexus where marine science and human stories meet. This lecture presents the findings of a multidisciplinary project, the ERC ACROSS Project, which studied seafaring in deep time between Sunda (Island....

18/09/2026

How do surface and underwater robotic vehicles, IoT sensors, and AI communicate in environments with limited power and constrained bandwidth? 🌊🤖

At Breaking the Surface, Ioannis Kyriakides from the Cyprus Marine and Maritime Institute (CMMI) will deliver a lecture on:

📌 "Integrated Marine Technologies for Sensing, Coordination and Situational Awareness"

Discover how CMMI integrates instrumented artificial reefs, autonomous marine vehicles, data fusion, and edge computing to build an interconnected ecosystem—enhancing real-time situational awareness for environmental monitoring, maritime safety, and marine research.

👉 Learn more & check out the program: https://bts.fer.hr/session/integrated-marine-technologies-for-sensing-coordination-and-situational-awareness/

Understanding the marine environment requires sensing systems, robotic vehicles, communications and data-fusion capabilities to operate seamlessly as an integrated system. Achieving this is challenging in environments characterised by limited power, constrained bandwidth, intermittent connectivity,....

10/09/2026

🌊 What can you do with 50,000 hydrophones? 🎧🤖

Traditional hydrophones are costly to manufacture and deploy, limiting our ability to listen to the ocean. But what if existing subsea fiber-optic cables could be transformed into tens of thousands of virtual hydrophones?

At , join Prof. John Potter (NTNU, Norway) for his lecture on Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS). He’ll explore how leveraging over 1 million km of legacy fiber-optic lines is revolutionizing underwater sensing—and introduce a breakthrough one-way physical wireless communication channel for autonomous underwater robotics! 💡

👉 Read the full lecture abstract and session details here:

https://bts.fer.hr/session/what-can-you-do-with-50000-hydrophones/

The ocean is huge, deep and impenetrable to electromagnetic waves, at least beyond a few tens of metres. Sound is the primary means by which everything is sensed and communicated, and this applies as much for robotic systems as for the animals that live there. Yet hydrophones are expensive both to m...

02/09/2026

🐋 Unmasking the Deep: Foraging Trends of Beaked Whales across the Australian Northwest Shelf 🌊

Despite serving as vital deep-sea sentinels, the foraging ecology of beaked whales (Ziphiidae) remains largely shrouded in mystery.

At Breaking the Surface, Shyam Madhusudhana will share findings from a year-long Passive Acoustic Monitoring (PAM) study along Australia's Northwest Shelf—a crucial cetacean habitat heavily impacted by offshore oil, gas, and shipping activity.

Using a semi-automated workflow based on correlogram visualizations of echolocation "buzzes" (rapid click trains indicating prey capture attempts), the research reveals continuous, year-round foraging with a pronounced nocturnal peak.

Join us to explore how smart acoustic analysis workflows allow researchers to monitor cryptic marine species in data-limited, industrialized environments!

🔗 Read more about the session: https://bts.fer.hr/session/unmasking-the-deep-foraging-trends-of-beaked-whales-ziphiidae-across-the-australian-northwest-shelf/

Despite their role as deep-sea sentinels, the foraging ecology of beaked whales remain poorly documented globally. This presentation shares insights from a year-long passive acoustic monitoring (PAM) study along Australia’s Northwest Shelf—a region vital for cetacean sustenance yet characterized...

27/08/2026

If you haven't received our last newsletter in your inboxes, here it is!

Join us at the Breaking the Surface 2026 edition on the beautiful Adriatic coast once again, this time in Hotel Imperial, Vodice, Croatia.

21/08/2026

🌊 How can autonomous marine robots transform the energy transition?

Maintaining and inspecting underwater energy infrastructure in harsh ocean environments is one of the toughest challenges facing the offshore industry today.

At Breaking the Surface 2026, Ignacio Carlucho (Ocean Systems Laboratory at Heriot-Watt University & The National Robotarium) will present "Marine Robots for the Energy Transition."

Discover cutting-edge research on:
🤖 Reinforcement learning for underwater vehicle control
🤝 Multi-agent coordination for cooperative inspections
📡 Perception systems utilizing sonar and optical mapping

👉 Read the full session abstract & details here: https://bts.fer.hr/session/marine-robots-for-the-energy-transition/

The offshore energy sector faces enormous challenges in maintaining and inspecting underwater infrastructure in hostile ocean environments. Autonomous marine robots offer a transformative solution, but achieving true autonomy in unstructured underwater settings remains an open research problem. In t...

17/08/2026

How do autonomous robots tackle the dirty, dangerous, and unpredictable jobs out in the wild? 🌊🤖

At , Eleni Kelasidi presents "Toward Robust Autonomy in Field Robotics" focusing on cutting-edge methods that keep robotic systems operating safely despite harsh conditions, sensor failures, and environmental uncertainty.

👉 Check out the full abstract and schedule:

Field robotics seeks to tackle some of society’s most dull, dirty, and dangerous jobs, from offshore inspection and environmental monitoring to industrial operations and exploration in extreme environments. Autonomous robots are increasingly deployed in complex and unstructured environments. While...

20/07/2026

🌊 What does a melting glacier sound like?

Polar fjords are on the front lines of climate change, but tracking exactly how fast they're losing ice is an massive challenge. Harsh weather, pitch-black polar nights, and hazardous, unstable ice walls make standard monitoring incredibly difficult.

That’s where passive underwater cryoacoustics comes in. By listening to the ocean, scientists are finding breakthroughs to link underwater melt and massive calving events directly to rising ocean temperatures.

Join us at Breaking the Surface for a fascinating lecture by Oskar Glowacki: "When Glaciers Meet the Ocean: Sensing Ice Loss in Polar Fjords."

Discover how autonomous observing systems and long-term acoustic monitoring are shifting our understanding of global sea-level rise. See you there! 👇
https://bts.fer.hr/session/when-glaciers-meet-the-ocean-sensing-ice-loss-in-polar-fjords/

Rising temperatures are driving rapid and accelerating loss of land-based ice, a major contributor to global sea-level rise and regional ocean freshening. Intrusions of warm ocean water to the ice–ocean boundary are among the primary drivers of mass loss from marine-terminating glaciers. However, ...