Over the past year, UnderSec partners have assembled a complete toolbox to detect, track and understand activities around critical and underwater infrastructures. The project started by looking at how networks of long‑range, direction‑only sensors “see” an area, developing methods to measure their coverage, to visualise blind spots and to optimise where and how sensors should operate. Building on this foundation, new algorithms were proposed to choose which sensors to activate and how to orient them, so that a limited number of devices can still deliver strong triangulation coverage even in complex environments with obstacles and existing transmitters.

At the same time, the consortium explored how to make sense of movement at sea. Automated maritime movement analysis methods were developed to clean noisy vessel data, fill gaps, smooth trajectories and calculate realistic speed and heading. These tools help distinguish normal traffic from unusual patterns near areas of special interest, and present the results on intuitive maps that practitioners can understand at a glance. In parallel, partners surveyed and compared underwater communication technologies – acoustic, electromagnetic, optical and emerging approaches – clarifying where each one is strong and where it struggles. This work ensures that the sensing and analysis developed in UnderSec can be supported by communication links that match the harsh reality of the underwater environment.

Together, these efforts have created a coherent technical backbone for UnderSec: from coverage quantification and genetic‑algorithm optimisation of sensor networks, through robust triangulation‑based localisation of transmitters, to real‑time maritime movement analysis and realistic underwater communications. This backbone now supports more informed decisions about how to deploy sensors, where to focus attention and how to maintain reliable information flows around critical underwater assets.