Sampling sea surfaces with SESAMO: An autonomous craft for the study of sea-air interactions

The sea surface autonomous modular unit (SESAMO) catamaran was atisfactorily exploited for sampling the sea-surface microlayer
and immediate subsurface in the Terra Nova Bay
area of the Ross Sea during the XIX Italian expedition to
Antarctica in January–February 2004. The SESAMO prototype
robot, designed to collect data and samples for the study of the
sea-air interface, is the result of the synergy between the robotics
group of Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche–Istituto di Studi
sui Sistemi Intelligenti per l”Automazione (CNR-ISSIA),
Genoa branch, and the scientific end users of Consiglio
Nazionale delle Ricerche–Istituto per la Dinamica dei Processi
Ambientali (CNR-IDPA, or Institute for the Dynamics of
Environmental Processes) in the framework of a project of the
Italian National Program of Research in Antarctica (PNRA). At
sea, operations showed that a relatively simple robot could satisfactorily
work in a natural, outdoor environment, dramatically
facilitating the job of the human operator.