
Summary:
- Photos and videos, somewhere in the south-west Indian Ocean
- November 2021: Robotic field campaign in Mayotte
- June 2021: Experimental robotic validation tests (Mediterranean Sea)
- Nov. 2020: Campaign for video recording in the lagoon of Mayotte
- April 2019: Rotation of the Marion Dufresne boat in the Scattered Islands
Photos and videos, somewhere in the south-west Indian Ocean


Robotics: Field campaign in Mayotte
November 2021
![]() | ![]() |
Like many experimental campaigns in Robotics, we had to face hardware failures: actuators, sensors, even the boat’s motors broke down and we had to paddle and pull the boat to the beach!
![]() | ![]() | ![]() |
![]() | ![]() | ![]() |
Robotics: Experimental validation test in the Mediterranean Sea
June 2021
Some members of the BUBOT team have participate to an experimental validation campaign of the underwater robot REMI

- 1 marine biologist from CUFR of Mayotte
- 1 computer scientist from ICAR team, LIRMM
- 4 members of the Explore team of LIRMM: 1 vision expert, 2 roboticists, 1 trainee
![]() | ![]() | ![]() |
![]() | ![]() | ![]() |
![]() REMI doing a transect | ![]() REMI spying on |
![]() The vision system | ![]() REMI in a posidonia meadow |
Campaign for video recording in the lagoon of Mayotte
1-12th November 2020
The BUBOT team led a field campaign in Mayotte from the 1st to 12th of November 2020.
The team includes 4 people from MARBEC lab: Camille Magneville (PhD student), Valentine Fleuré (research assistant), Nicolas Loiseau (post-doc) and Sébastien Villéger (CNRS researcher) who were allowed to fly to Mayotte (after checking for not being infected by COVID-19) to join there Thomas Claverie (Lecturer at CUFR).
The studied sites:
The main objective of this campaign was to compare the biodiversity of marine vertebrates in a fully protected site (N’Gouja reef) and a site where artisanal fishing is allowed (Boueni reef).
The recording protocol:
Using new underwater cameras designed at MARBEC lab, our team was able to remotely record videos for 10 hours (from 7AM to 5PM) in 6 spots scattered over the fringing reef each day. In addition, using ‘normal’ underwater cameras we recorded for 1h45 three times (morning, noon, evening) in another series of 6 spots each day. This protocol was repeated 4 days in each of the 2 sites. Eventually, we recorded >700 hours of high definition videos that will allow us to census all the species present in each site and more importantly to assess their ecological roles such as grazing on algae and bioeroding corals. While snorkelling over the studied reefs (away from remote camera) we also recorded >100 short videos and shot >1000 pictures of the many fishes we encountered. These media will complete our existing database of fish pictures required for training Deep-Learning algorithms that will hopefully be soon able to save time processing the videos. Last (but not least), we even got ‘lucky’ to have our cameras recording during the 5.3-magnitude earthquake that shakes Mayotte seafloor on the 10th of November at 12:19.

View from above of one of the long-duration underwater video system

Underwater Handling of a 2m² quadrat placed in front of the cameras to standardize biodiversity measures afterwards

Green turtles passing in front of short duration cameras
Rotation of the Marion Dufresne boat in the Scattered Islands
4-20 april 2019
The journey :


The logistics side :



The video recording system :
