UWIS dive: Scientific diver training
UWIS was used for European Scientific Diving (ESD) training course.
Mission: Demonstrate and educate science divers on how to use the UWIS system. This time, the UWIS and Alltab tablet's field data collection software "Allure" was used for the first time together.
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UWIS Scientific
The place of education was the Sven Love'n Center in Kristineberg, Sweden. It is part of the University of Gothenburg. The course provided all the gears for diving. The students of the course were already graduated researchers who deepened their knowledge in science diving
The topics of the course were: diving safety and field data collection.
The water temperature was about 16 degrees, the visibility was about 6 meters and maximum dive depth 7 meters.
The first day's dives were made from the center's home dock. The UWIS buoys were placed in a small triangle on the dock structures. To eliminate the GPS inaccuracy, the UWIS settings was given fixed buoy coordinates, which allows for very accurate tracking of the divers' route.
Below are photos of working on the dock.
UWIS buoy unit
The diving pairs had slightly different tasks and therefore the diving routes were different. Groups of "Boys" collected observations at marked points and groups of "Girls" progressed by sector observing the presence of seagrass.
Below is a UWIS Tracker view and a dive view of Google Earth Pro downloaded from the log file.
UWIS Tracker
KML track in Google Earth
The second day's dives were done from boats. We had got a good aerial photo (drone photo) of the area, which even showed some of the seagrass areas. We installed it as the overlay of the "Valtamer Navigator for UWIS" software, allowing the diver to see where he or she was relative to the photo.
When diving from a boat, actual monitoring of the dive is also a safery factor.
Below are views of the Alltab underwater tablet during the dive.
The first image shows an aerial view of the background of the navigation software and the other two images of the field data collection software "Allure" during and immediately after the etry. Data can be synchronized to the cloud right after diver enters the surface.
In Allure, the diver receives the coordinate and depth provided by UWIS with a single "set" command to mark his or her data.
Underwater navigator (drone photo)
Field data collection
Database