Innovation at work

We’ve engineered BlueComm 200 to push the boundaries of your underwater communication. Using advanced LED technology and sensitive photomultiplier tubes, you’ll achieve communication ranges up to 150 m. Its design houses the emitter separately from the receiver, ensuring optimal performance and reliability.

Fast and flexible – key features to power your mission

• Lightning-fast data transfer: 2.5 to 10 Mbps at ranges up to 150 m
• Optimal performance: Perfect for moderate to low turbidity dark water (>200 m depth or at night)
• Flexible deployment: Connect with your AUV, ROV, USV or surface dunker system
• Deep-rated capability: Ready for operations up to 4,000 m
• Speed of light technology: Experience unprecedented data transmission rates

Perfect for your platform

Perfect for your:

• Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
• Extra-large uncrewed underwater vehicles (XLUUV)
• Uncrewed Surface Vehicles
• Remotely Operated Vehicles
• Tracking and communications systems

Choose your perfect match:

BlueComm 200

When you need maximum range and performance in dark water conditions, our visible light system delivers up to 150 m range – ideal for video transfer and direct vehicle control. You’ll transfer data up to 10,000 times faster than acoustic systems, although ambient light may affect operating range.

BlueComm 200 UV

Working with lights on? Our UV variant maintains reliable communication even with artificial lighting present. Operating at ranges up to 75 metres, it’s your go-to solution for ROV and AUV applications requiring illumination, such as video recording missions.

Both systems offer incredible energy efficiency – transfer more than nine gigabytes of data using just one Lithium D cell battery.

The solution

Launched in 2018, the OD OBN programme is a research and development collaboration between partners Shell, Petrobras, SENAI CIMATEC and Sonardyne, supported under the Research Development and Innovation funding clause of the Brazilian National Agency for Petroleum, Natural Gas and Biofuels (ANP).The On-Demand Ocean Bottom Node (OD OBN) programme marks a pivotal step in addressing these challenges, providing a disruptive approach to time-lapse seismic data acquisition.

It is a pioneering new [system for] acquiring 4D seismic data, which delivers more efficient and cost-effective surveillance of complex pre-salt fields. At its core is a long-term OBN system that can remain on the seabed for several years, capturing seismic data that can be recorded and harvested “on-demand” using autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), without the need for repeated deployment and retrieval cycles.

Vast quantities of seismic data are harvested wirelessly using an AUV such as Saipem’s ‘Flatfish’, that implements the through-water optical interface to interrogate the OD OBNs, as developed under a separate ANP programme sponsored by Shell.

This AUV data harvesting approach eliminates the need for node recovery, dramatically reducing vessel time, operational complexity and associated costs.

Key Sonardyne technologies include wireless acoustic communications, required for long range recording control and node clock time offset measurement, and Sonardyne’s BlueComm extremely high-speed optical communications for short range data harvesting to a nearby AUV or remotely operated vehicle (ROV).

The results

Over 2,000 days of trials of pre-production nodes have been conducted across various pre-salt fields including Sapinhoá, Itapu and Buzios. These have successfully demonstrated acoustic control, high-fidelity data acquisition and optical data harvesting using BlueComm, as well as comparing OD OBN data with that of other commercial nodes.

The final round of tests concluded successfully in 2025, with results presented at the IMAGE ‘25 conference in Houston and SBGf Rio’25 conference in Rio de Janeiro.

Next steps

A pilot array of 660 pre-production nodes is currently being produced at a brand-new manufacturing facility in Camaçari, near Salvador, Brazil. Hundreds of these nodes will soon be deployed at the Mero field operated by Petrobras for extended testing and performance evaluation.

The long-term vision is to use autonomy and state of the art communications technologies to enable operators to conduct more frequent ‘on demand’ seismic surveys, with higher fidelity data, at a fraction of the cost of conventional seismic survey methods.

This capability will provide clearer insights into fluid movements and pressure changes within the reservoir, helping to optimise production strategies, improve decision making and enhance recovery rates in one of the world’s most challenging offshore provinces.

OD OBN is not just an incremental improvement, but a fundamental shift in how the industry approaches deepwater reservoir management.

Overview

The instrument is a turn-key solution comprised of carefully selected high grade and highly reliable inertial sensors integrated into in-house designed inertial measurement unit (IMU).

The selected inertial sensors are the standard for commercial aviation with a proven 20+ year track record. These sensors have a highly desirable characteristic being insensitive to vibration, temperature changes and having very limited initial errors. The result is a system which is highly suitable for the marine environment where performance, robustness and data integrity need to be available from initialisation, even during the harshest conditions.

Lodestar requires no external aiding and settles robustly in dynamic conditions in less than five minutes. On-board data storage and backup battery functionality ensures continued operation and eliminates the risk of data loss even if communications or external power are lost. Power-pass through to external aiding sensors is supported to ease integration requiring only a single cable for comms and power.

If a full INS solution is required, Lodestar can easily be field upgraded to a SPRINT system (apart from Lodestar 200). This makes the Lodestar a flexible and future-proof solution for both ROV guidance and survey applications.

Lodestar has a proven track record spanning more than 10 years in the field in diverse applications from ROV guidance and autopilot to demanding survey applications. The instrument is available in 4,000 and 6,000 metre depth ratings with a variety of connector options and configurations.

At a glance

• Designed to aid subsea vehicle guidance: AUVs, ROVs and UUVs
• Uses high quality Honeywell gyro and accelerometers
• Sensors available in three performance levels: 200, 300 and 500
• Fast settling time so you can get straight to work
• Integrated DVL option available; Lodestar-Nav
• Factory upgradeable to SPRINT INS

Lodestar-Nav 200
Lodestar-Nav 200 provides all-in-one navigation solution for subsea vehicles by combining a Lodestar 200 AHRS with our Syrinx Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) and a high accuracy pressure sensor in a single housing.  This saves cost, payload space and the complexity of integrating and operating separate sensors from different vendors.

Lodestar-Nav is pre-calibrated providing the ROV pilots with a robust and reliable solution, even in the most challenging operational scenarios, without needing to worry about sensor offsets.

Syrinx DVL inside that provides a large altitude range and high precision at all altitudes; this combines the best of 300 and 1200 kHz DVLs. Each DVL transducer is fitted with a full depth rated water block to ensure protection of the internal components and easy replacement if damaged.

Lodestar-Nav can be interfaced via a single connection and/or the DVL can be interfaced separately depending on requirements. Continuous on-board data storage supports post-mission diagnostics and post-processing.