The Oceanic Platform of the Canary Islands -PLOCAN- announces the 9th Glider School edition, a reference hands-on and training forum on ocean-gliders technology. It will be organized in the first week of October 2018 in Gran Canaria (Spain). Registration will open in the website http://www.gliderschool.eu on Friday 19th January.
Didactical contents will cover both hardware and software issues through theoretical and practical dedicated sessions in class, lab and open waters using real ocean-glider units by different technologies (Waveglider, Sailbuoy, Slocum, Seaglider and Seaexplorer), and focusing on ocean-glider features, capabilities and applications.
This highly specialized training week represents a great opportunity for students and professionals worldwide to learn about the main commercial ocean-glider technologies. After the 2017 edition, 107 students from 23 countries have been trained, representing the 5 continents.
The Glider School counts with the direct teaching-support from leading ocean-glider manufacturers, sensors and rest of modules that integrates these state-of-the-art unmanned autonomous ocean-observing platforms.
Experts from the Macaronesia Network of Inter-regional and Multi-disciplinary Transfer of Knowledge and -Technologies for the protection, surveillance and monitoring of cetaceans in the marine environment and sustainably analyse and explore the associated tourism activity project (MARCET) took part in the MSM68-2 oceanographic campaign on the oceanographic vessel Maria S. Merian for 11 days, setting off from the port of Emden, Germany, heading for Mindelo, on the island of São Vicente, Cape Verde.
PLOCAN took part in the Sixth General Assembly of the Smart Submarine Robots Working in Co-operative Networks project (SWARMS) funded by the European Commission and the Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and organised in the offices of Tecnalia in Bilbao.
Secondary school students from Greece and Estonia, along with students from the IES Schamann High School, visited the shore facilities of the Canary Island Oceanic Platform as part of the Erasmus+ project “Through robotics and collaboration to the successful citizens of the 21st century”.
The Erasmus + project promotes a strategic partnership among school pupils, which is why Estonian and Greek students will spend the second week of December in Gran Canaria, staying with the families of the students from the IES Schamann high school, creating the conditions for an additional experience of cultural and linguistic emersion among all these European students.
The visit by the students will include a face-to-face workshop to build submarine robots that has been organised in a total of 30 schools in Gran Canaria in 2017 as part of the EDUROVs initiative, and the testing of these robots on the jetty at Taliarte docks. In fact, one of the objectives of the project is to build submarine robots using the Arduino free hardware platform and every-day, low-cost or recycled materials.
The “Through robotics and collaboration to the successful citizens of the 21st century” is co-funded by the European Commission’s Erasmus+ programme.