We took part in the second round of Réinventer les Ports d’Antibes, alongside Adequate Tools, in a programme led by Riviera Ports with CASA, the Fondation Sophia Antipolis, and La French Tech Côte d’Azur. Our session set out how port water could be watched continuously rather than sampled.
A port is an awkward optical environment. It is enclosed, heavily trafficked, and shallow, the contamination that matters arrives without warning and disperses before a scheduled sample would find it, and the infrastructure that would need watching sits underwater where surface methods cannot read it. No single instrument covers that, which is why what we presented is a layer of them rather than a product.
A fixed buoy would hold the baseline, combining multiparameter measurements with a micro-LIF lidar to watch one location without interruption. A surface drone would carry the same class of measurement across the basin for mobile mapping and targeted inspection, and an underwater vehicle would work inside the water column and along port structures, where a contaminant flow can be read before it ever reaches the surface. The LIFL-11 would cover the surface itself, mapping pollution in real time from a moving boat.
The underwater element draws on SubseaLIF, our development work with Adequate Tools on an underwater laser-induced fluorescence lidar. That instrument is in development rather than on the shelf, and the Antibes session was the case for the approach, not a catalogue.