Offshore staff
ESBJERG, Denmark – Semco Maritime is working on a remote collaboration program designed to cut downtime for its offshore clients.
The company is testing various devices using augmented reality to perform remote collaboration between offshore service personnel and onshore specialists.
As an example, a service technician will wear Trimble XR10, a device that integrates the HoloLens 2 glasses from Microsoft into a hardhat, while walking around an offshore installation in the North Sea.
At the same time, project teams onshore in Esbjerg can see exactly what the technician sees. “A lot of service and maintenance on our equipment requires special knowledge but doesn’t necessarily take long to perform,” said Bjarke Nordsen, mechanical engineer at Semco Maritime.
“If we equip the offshore personnel with a HoloLens or a similar device, a large part of these tasks can be carried out by local staff with remote assistance from our experts onshore.”
The latter can take in the technician’s field of vision and draw or write in a digital layer that the technician can view on top of the real world via the glasses.
“We are already saving time and money with the participants in our test program – and we have kept operations going through the travel restrictions due to COVID-19,” said Alexia Jacobsen, innovation lead at Semco Maritime.
“As we grow more experienced and start adding more data in the digital layer, we expect to cut down travelling significantly in every step from product development over commissioning to maintenance.”
The company also believes factory acceptance tests (FATs) could benefit from remote collaboration. Earlier this year, Semco assembled equipment in its Singapore factory, but due to COVID-19, the FAT could not be performed, slowing delivery to the client.
Remote collaboration through Augmented Reality could be the way forward, according to Sai Thane Han, Semco’s team lead commissioning.
“When we use remote collaboration for FAT, the customer only needs to send one person, and then the rest of their team can join a Teams meeting and guide their colleague to perform the tasks of their expertise. The process will be cheaper, and in most cases, we will be able to ship the finalized equipment sooner.”
Remote collaboration takes place via a regular Microsoft Teams meeting, with different specialists participating if needed.
Semco Maritime has performed tests with different equipment and digital setups, assisted by Danish company Virsabi, a specialist in virtual and augmented reality solutions.
08/18/2020
