What Kongsberg's EM Sensor Rebrand Reveals About Positioning Integration

What Kongsberg Actually Announced

In February 2026, Kongsberg Discovery announced a major hardware and software upgrade to the Argeo Listen electromagnetic sensor system and rebranded it “Kongsberg Listen”. The renaming follows the August 2025 acquisition: Kongsberg Discovery bought three core technologies – Argeo Whisper, Argeo Listen and Argeo Scope – from the bankruptcy estate of Argeo, along with software, hardware and a team of specialist personnel. The upgraded platform now sits inside Blue Insight, Kongsberg’s data and analytics ecosystem, with EM data processing, interpretation and visualisation in a single software environment.

Kongsberg states the system has already been integrated and operated on its HUGIN family of AUVs in commercial surveys, across applications ranging from pipeline inspection with cathodic protection evaluation to marine mineral exploration and geophysical surveys including buried cable positioning. The company plans to show the rebranded system at Oceanology International in London from 10 to 12 March 2026 (booth D600) – its trade-show debut as Kongsberg Listen. According to Executive Vice President Audun Berg, the platform is application-agnostic, making it suitable for ocean science, defence, energy and minerals.

Why an OEM Move Turns a Niche Tool Into a Spec Line

The industry has seen this pattern of integration before. Multibeam echo sounders were once the domain of dedicated hydrographic vessels, then became standard equipment across marine survey. The same trajectory applies to USBL for ROV positioning. EM sensing now looks set to follow, moving from a niche geophysical capability toward a routine line item in subsea survey specifications.

The rebrand and integration are a clear signal of where Kongsberg believes EM technology is heading. The company did not buy Argeo’s technology to keep selling it as a specialist surveying service; it is folding EM sensing into its wider portfolio – HUGIN AUVs, Blue Insight and the rest. When a major OEM makes a move like this, the capability tends to become a normal expectation rather than an exotic one.

For practitioners, that combination of promise and pitfall is what matters. EM sensing can solve positioning problems where acoustic and optical methods fail – especially for buried metallic objects that simply cannot be seen or imaged acoustically. The flip side: clients may request EM surveys without a clear understanding of what the technology actually measures, or how its results should be verified.

How EM Positioning Differs From Acoustics

The principle is straightforward. Electromagnetic sensing, which responds to contrasts in electrical conductivity and magnetic permeability, can detect metallic structures – pipelines, cables, well casings – even where they are buried under sediment. Unlike a magnetometer, which measures total magnetic field strength, a passive EM system picks up electromagnetic signatures arising from the way such structures interact with the Earth’s field or with the electric fields generated by cathodic protection on pipelines.

Under favourable conditions – modest burial depth, suitable sediment conductivity – EM methods can constrain the position of a buried pipeline to roughly a metre, which is genuinely useful where acoustic methods cannot resolve a target on a mobile seabed. This is where EM sensing is at its strongest.

The Blue Insight integration is built on the premise that surveyors can readily combine EM data with bathymetry, backscatter and sub-bottom profiling. That holds – provided the team understands each of those data sets on its own terms.

Bathymetry gives seabed depth with uncertainties characterised against IHO S-44. Backscatter gives a relative measure of seabed hardness whose interpretation is largely judgement-based. Sub-bottom profiling gives stratigraphy with vertical resolution that degrades with depth. EM gives conductivity contrasts that must then be attributed to plausible structures.

Four measurement principles, four different uncertainty characters. A single viewer does not merge those errors into one. Quality assurance has to treat them separately, even when the software renders them in the same map frame.

Where Clients Get It Wrong

1. Assuming EM Data Has the Same Positional Accuracy as Acoustics

A recurring error in survey specifications is to quote the AUV’s navigation accuracy as if it were the accuracy with which EM sensing locates a buried target. These are two different things. A statement that a HUGIN survey “positions buried pipelines to better than half a metre” conflates the platform’s navigation performance with the EM system’s ability to infer a target location from conductivity contrasts.

The sub-metre positioning of a HUGIN AUV comes from inertial navigation aided by DVL and USBL updates – that is platform position. The EM sensor, by contrast, detects an electromagnetic feature and attributes it to a sub-seabed structure. The accuracy of that attribution depends on signal strength, target burial depth, sediment properties and processing, not solely on how well the AUV knows where it is.

As a rule of thumb, EM positioning of a shallow, CP-protected pipeline in conductive sediment is tighter than that of a deeper, passive structure under resistive sand – and both are generally looser than the platform’s own navigation accuracy. Specifications should state navigation accuracy and EM detection/positioning accuracy separately, and the latter should be supported by trials over a representative seabed rather than assumed.

2. Not Defining What “Detection” Actually Means

EM detection is a thresholding decision, not the near-binary call that multibeam allows. With acoustics you largely get a return or you don’t. EM is about recognising conductivity gradients and interpreting anomalies, and it is inherently probabilistic: can an anomaly be declared, with stated confidence, as a buried structure rather than geological noise?

Consider a small-diameter pipe at modest burial depth in a marginal signal-to-noise environment. The system may register anomalies, but aggressive filtering to clean up the signature can come at the cost of positional accuracy. Detecting that a feature is present is not the same as positioning it well – and a specification that asks only “was it detected?” will not surface that distinction.

Set clear detection criteria up front: minimum signal-to-noise ratio, maximum burial depth, target diameter, seabed conductivity. Agree these limits before mobilisation, not during data analysis.

3. Ignoring Geophysical Ground-Truthing

EM anomalies are not self-identifying. A strong EM signature a couple of hundred metres from a known pipeline could be an unrecorded spur line – but it could equally be a wellhead, a buried container or a mineralised geological feature. Without independent inspection, attribution is a judgement call.

The standard approach: correlate EM results with other data – multibeam, magnetometer, sub-bottom profiler. Where that does not resolve the ambiguity, task an ROV for visual inspection or seabed sampling.

Integrating EM into Blue Insight makes these cross-comparisons easier from a software standpoint, but it does not remove the need for ground-truthing. There is a real risk of attributing an EM anomaly to a known cable route purely on the basis of proximity. That may be acceptable for planning, but not for as-built deliverables to a regulator or for updating an authoritative GIS.

Verify a meaningful sample of EM findings on site – more where conditions are unfamiliar or the installation is large.

4. Misunderstanding What “Platform Agnostic” Deployment Means

Kongsberg describes the system as application- and platform-agnostic. That is a genuine strength, but the choice of platform still affects data quality and operations.

On a HUGIN AUV you get stable altitude control, precise navigation and steady speeds – close to ideal for EM sensing at a fixed height above the seabed with minimal attitude disturbance. Plan lines for overlap and check positioning with crosslines. A vessel-towed system is a different proposition: variable layback, altitude excursions and irregular ground speed in turns. The data is usable, but the uncertainty budget is larger.

An ROV during a pipeline inspection offers strong ground-truth potential but patchy survey geometry – it follows the pipeline rather than a planned grid. EM sensing can confirm burial depth and CP condition along the route, but without the systematic coverage of a pre-planned AUV sweep.

“Platform agnostic” means mounting flexibility; it does not guarantee uniform data quality. Tailor the survey design and uncertainty estimates to the platform actually used.

The Real Integration Challenge

Kongsberg’s integration of EM into Blue Insight addresses a real industry need: too many disparate data sets, each locked in its own proprietary software silo. The integration promises to remove much of the friction of manual data migration.

The catch is that the same integration introduces a risk. When different data sets share one viewer, similar symbology and a common map frame, false equivalence creeps in. An EM-derived pipeline position can start to look as authoritative as a pipeline traced from multibeam. They are both lines on a screen – but they are not the same kind of measurement.

Position uncertainty here is not a like-for-like comparison. EM positioning varies with survey-line direction, degrades with target depth and is sensitive to spatial variation in seabed conductivity in ways bathymetry is not. The discipline is to carry a separate uncertainty budget for each data set, however clean the combined picture looks. IHO S-44, which characterises bathymetric uncertainty, is not a fit for EM positioning; an equivalent framework is needed that focuses on signal-processing uncertainty, burial depth and conductivity variability.

That kind of agreed, EM-specific standard is still missing. IMCA S 019 (Guidance on Subsea Metrology) frames uncertainty for acoustic and inertial metrology techniques, but there is no equivalent consensus for electromagnetic positioning. Kongsberg has solved a software-integration problem; the question of how to standardise EM positioning uncertainty remains open.

What Changes Now

Expect EM sensing to appear in more survey specifications. Clients who previously accepted “pipeline not detected – assumed buried” will increasingly ask for EM surveys to confirm depth and position, which makes sense across an asset’s management lifecycle.

The technology works and the integration is sensible. The danger lies in teams equating EM data with acoustic positioning and overlooking the different error profiles. An effective EM survey specification should set out:

• Clear detection benchmarks (signal-to-noise ratio, confidence level)
• Position-accuracy expectations as a function of burial depth and target size
• Ground-truthing proportions and methods
• Seabed conductivity context for interpreting EM signatures
• Distinct uncertainty budgets for navigation and for EM detection
• Deliverables that report detected positions with confidence metrics, not bare coordinates

Get this right and the result is better-positioned assets and fewer surprises during construction or intervention. Treat EM as just another box to tick and the limitations surface at the worst possible moment. Kongsberg has made real progress in deploying and integrating EM sensing – but that progress does not resolve the interpretation challenges or the physics. Expert analysis and honest uncertainty quantification are still required. Software integration does not change that.

---

Based on: Kongsberg Discovery expands subsea sensing portfolio under Listen brand