HYDRO-01 · Compact environmental monitoring platform
Small vessel,
big questions.
HYDRO-01 is our autonomous, remotely supervised water drone for monitoring and data collection. It was deployed and tested in real sea conditions in the Faroe Islands (2026 North Atlantic campaign): supervised autonomous navigation, communications, energy management, equipment resilience, remote operations. It is the BIUTOPIC system's testbed: validate fast and affordably, then transfer proven technologies to the larger platforms. It extends the laboratory beyond the boat.
Next iteration · HYDRO‑02
In development
What has been tested
- Launch and recovery
- Remote communications
- Energy integration
- Supervised navigation
- Equipment resilience
- Payload deployment
What still needs work
- Waterproofing
- Battery-management resilience
- Communication redundancy
- Maintenance in remote environments
- Progressive autonomy
Manufacturer document — Blue Robotics (T200)
Plate · Symbiosis 02 · Apis mellifera, scouts
When a swarm looks for a new home, a few scouts fly ahead — the colony only settles once the site is validated.
HYDRO‑01 is our scout: small and fast, it tests in real conditions what the larger platforms will carry next.
North Atlantic campaign — 2026 · HYDRO-01
Drag to rotate — the HYDRO-01 test campaign, North Atlantic 2026.
- Convoy Brittany → Denmark
- Convoy Denmark → Faroe Islands
- Sea trials — 2026 Faroe Islands
- Under consideration Faroe → Iceland
Convoy (road & ferry) ≠ autonomous navigation. HYDRO-01’s sea trials took place in Faroese coastal waters.
Operational envelope
- Compact USV platform · BIUTOPIC instrumented architecture
- 2× T200 thrusters
- 100 Ah battery
- 150 W solar
- 4G link
- Mission range ~15 km
- Top speed 5.6 kt
- Supervised autonomous navigation
Campaign register · Faroe Islands · 2026 Preliminary data
15 launches, one island after another.
Detailed telemetry (GPS, heading, energy) to be extracted from the black box once the boat is back — full publication after log validation.
The mission-by-mission detail will be extracted from the onboard black box — the boat is still in Scotland, extraction happens once it is back in hand, then published here after validation.
Data & systems David Aznaurov Robotics, AI & data → the crew
Why the North Atlantic?
The near-constant light of the northern summer
At high latitudes, summer days offer almost continuous daylight. It is an ideal test bench for measuring real solar yield — panels, batteries, the whole energy chain — under conditions few laboratories can reproduce.
Listening to the ocean as it is
HYDRO-01 deploys acoustic recorders to capture the real marine soundscape: ambient noise, shipping traffic, the presence of life. These recordings build a baseline for understanding the sound impact of navigation — and for measuring, tomorrow, the relative silence of L'Hydronaute.
Validate before scaling
Autonomous navigation, seakeeping, energy endurance: everything validated at small scale on HYDRO-01 directly informs the design of L'Hydronaute and the EXO-01 modular exoskeleton. The prototype de-risks — the demonstrator carries the public.