Community Underwater Ordnance Mapper

The Problem

Communities living alongside contaminated waterways often know where it is dangerous: boats sink, nets snag, and certain reaches are avoided. What is missing is an affordable way to turn that local knowledge into a repeatable suspect-area map that can be shared with professional clearance teams.

The working constraint is not only detection. A low-cost sensor still becomes an expensive system if it requires a hired boat, crew, fuel, specialist operators, and people working on contaminated water.

The Concept

OCUM proposed a low-cost autonomous surface vessel for non-technical survey. One shore-based operator launches, monitors, and retrieves the platform. The system surveys a waterway, logs georeferenced magnetic anomalies, and produces a clearance-team-ready suspect-area map.

The design deliberately used mature open-source autopilot firmware and commodity components. That kept the proposal focused on system integration, evidence, operating model, and validation rather than speculative software claims.

The Analytical Move

The submission costed the whole operation, not just the instrument. It treated boat hire, personnel exposure, survey coverage, survey repeatability, local deployment, and map handover as part of the system boundary.

Detection claims were bounded by published sensor specifications and underwater UXO magnetometry literature. Limitations were declared explicitly so the proposal could be evaluated on defensible assumptions rather than presentation confidence.

What The Pack Demonstrated

• System architecture across sensor, platform, operator, and output.
• Costed bill of materials for a low-capital survey capability.
• Survey operations model designed around shore-based community use.
• Compatibility with mine-action information handover requirements.
• Risk register and validation plan rather than unqualified performance claims.

Why It Belongs Here

The outcome was not an award, but reaching final detailed evaluation is still useful evidence of the underlying work: problem framing, open-source research, operational costing, technical limitation setting, and decision-ready writing under a live challenge brief.