In May of 2021, COVE’s Stella Maris touched down on the floor of the Halifax Harbour for the first time. Almost one year to the day, the platform will be recognized with the Lieutenant Governor’s Award for Excellence in Engineering.
The Engineers Nova Scotia award is given annually to a team, company, government department or consortium of professional engineers, who through original achievement or creative accomplishment in the application of engineering principles, and excellence in engineering design, demonstrates a high quality of professional engineering. The recipient’s project should show economic benefit and highlight Nova Scotian leadership in the practice of engineering.
The award-winning Stella Maris was developed by a team of top engineers at COVE. The multi-sensor seabed platform is a low-cost and easily accessible way for ocean technology companies to conduct product development, verification, and commercialization to get their products to market faster.
The small triangular frame sits on the seabed 10 metres below the surface and 100 metres from COVE’s wharf. The platform, capable of holding a wide variety of sensors that collect different oceanographic parameters, is cabled to a shoreside operations centre supplying power and data-communications to the platform. Users can remotely monitor, control and configure equipment on the platform from the operations centre. Real-time ocean data and video is available to credentialled users.
While there are other subsea platforms around the world, they are almost all built for research purposes. What makes Stella Maris unique is that it is designed for product development and promoting ocean technology.
COVE is thrilled to be recognized with this year’s award. Nearing the one-year anniversary of the Stella Maris launch, the platform has already proven to exciting development for the ocean tech world. Companies using the Stella Maris are not only benefitting from data collected from their own sensors but are also relying on data from other sensors to support their own. The possibilities for collaboration between sensors on the platform are endless.
While Stella Maris has brought excitement and collaboration in its first year, the future of the platform holds even greater opportunities. The capability to allow companies to put sensors on the platform and receive real-time data from wherever they may be in the world is growing international interest. We have only scratched the surface of the potential of the platform, and the potential for broader collaboration around the world.
COVE will formally accept the Engineers Nova Scotia Excellence in Engineering award on May 19, 2022.