Offshore staff
YATELEY, UK – HydroSurv Unmanned Survey has teamed up with Sonardyne to develop and demonstrate seabed-to-shore sensing and data acquisition technologies for offshore operations.
Part-funded by Innovate UK through its Robotics for a Safer World: extension project, HydroSurv’s REAV-40 USV will be paired with intelligent seafloor and vessel-mounted instruments from Sonardyne. These will then be used in combination with internet-based cloud services to provide an end-to-end seabed-data-to-shore service initially targeted toward the offshore wind industry.
Key elements of the project include a self-transiting USV, acoustic positioning of and data harvesting from seabed instruments, real-time gathering of geo-referenced current profile data and live relay of information to operatives onshore through secure cloud-based systems.
The project is also expected to demonstrate the ability to overcome potential navigational limitations working in and around wind farms.
The key instrument package includes Sonardyne’s Mini-Ranger 2 Ultra-Short BaseLine acoustic positioning system and its SPRINT-Nav hybrid acoustic-INS navigation instrument. This provides USV platforms with navigational redundancy both for when GNSS is compromised and where DVL bottom lock is out of range. Used in combination with Sonardyne’s seafloor sensors and access to cloud-based services, this package provides an integrated suite of capabilities to maximize the use of USVs for intelligent data harvesting operations in remote offshore environments.
The project officially launches in April 2021. The culmination of the project will be a series of demonstrations at an operational offshore wind farm site within the UK.
Geraint West, Global Business Manager, Oceanographic, at Sonardyne, said: “Combining USVs like HydroSurv’s REAV-40 with our seabed-data-to-shore technologies promises to bring a step change in the efficiency of asset monitoring and data gathering operations for the offshore wind industry.
“Using USVs, which can be deployed at short notice, can vastly reduce operator logistics, emissions, risk to humans and costs and will allow operators faster access to operationally important information about their wind farms.”
02/24/2021
