On 24 April 2026, the final workshop of PANACEA - a PRIN 2022 research project funded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research - marked the official conclusion of two and a half years of work at the frontier of autonomous marine robotics. Several members of the PerSEAve team played a central role in the project, contributing the core technical expertise that drove its most significant results.
PANACEA objective
The project's goal was ambitious: develop a cooperative multi-robot system capable of autonomously monitoring Posidonia oceanica meadows - the endemic plant that forms one of the Mediterranean Sea's most critical and most threatened ecosystems. To do so, the project brought together the autonomous underwater vehicles of the University of Pisa and the University of Florence, equipping them with multimodal sensor suites - optical cameras and acoustic sonar - to collect rich, layered data of the seabed in real operating conditions.
Main achievements
At the heart of PANACEA's technical achievements was the work carried out by Francesco Ruscio, one of PerSEAve's members, who led the development of the AI and perception pipeline throughout the project. His work - and that of the broader research team he led - focused on the problems that matter most when you bring autonomous systems into real underwater environments: making sense of what the robot sees, in real-time, while it moves.
This meant designing and deploying deep learning models for semantic segmentation of the seabed, enabling the vehicles to classify the seafloor continuously as they navigated - distinguishing Posidonia oceanica meadows from bare substrate, identifying the boundaries of the meadow, and doing so without stopping, without surfacing, and without waiting for data to be processed onshore. Alongside this, the team developed and tested methods for the autonomous tracking and georeferencing of the meadow borders, a key output for ecological assessment and long-term monitoring.
Posidonia oceanica matters
Posidonia oceanica is not simply a plant on the seafloor. It is a foundation species: it produces oxygen, sequesters carbon, stabilises sediments, and supports the biodiversity of the entire western Mediterranean coastal ecosystem. Its decline, driven by coastal development, water pollution, and rising sea temperatures, is one of the clearest indicators of environmental stress in the region. Reliable, scalable monitoring tools are not a scientific luxury; they are a conservation necessity. That is precisely what PANACEA worked towards, and what PerSEAve will continue to pursue.