SARTI research group of the Universidad Politécnica de Cataluña (UPC) (www.cdsarti.org) is also a member of TECNIO network, and specializes in the design and deployment of measurement and data acquisition and processing systems, especially aimed at marine applications. It is a Research Group of reference in the technologies of instrumentation and the intelligent systems of sensors, and wants to do it with a double line: the transversal application to all the industrial and all the productive fields. The SARTI is a multidisciplinary group, made up of more than 10 engineers and scientists from different fields: electronics, telecommunications, chemistry, marine sciences.

The group provides the OBSEA submarine laboratory for this project to carry out pilot tests to monitor, and validate the reef and the new monitoring tools to be developed. This underwater laboratory is unique in Catalonia, and with PLOCAN (Canary Islands), are the only two existing laboratories at national level in this field. It is connected with 4 km of cable to the coast of Vilanova i la Geltrú (Barcelona, Spain) and placed at a depth of 20 m in a fishing protected and Natura 2000 area. The main advantage of the cabled observatory is the capacity to feed the station from land with up to 3.6 kW and the high bandwidth communication link of 1 Gbps. This link gives the information in real time and avoids the drawbacks of battery powered systems. This observatory, developed by the researchers of SARTI-UPC team, allows the scientific community to test their devices in shallow waters (European Multidisciplinary Seafloor and water column Observatory-EMSO testing site).