Doing More with Less - Advanced Sensing Enabling Next Generation Inspection, Maintenance, and Repair Platforms for Offshore Energy Assets

Offshore energy production from both oil & gas production and wind farms currently provides over a fifth of the world’s energy mix and is forecast to grow significantly in the coming years. Higher reliability and better cost effectiveness of the energy production systems is required for this growth to occur. Service providers relentlessly optimize their technology performance and service delivery to improve asset economics both in existing fields as well as in new developments. A key area for optimization is in the multi-billion-dollar investments in offshore fields that require continual expenditures for services such as inspection, maintenance, and repair (IMR) to ensure asset integrity.

IMR service providers currently use remotely operated vehicles (ROV) tethered to a surface vessel and piloted in real-time. Recent progress in underwater perception, maritime autonomy, and artificial intelligence can disrupt this legacy method and allow development of a leaner service model that significantly reduces the costly vessel and personnel support while improving data quality. Our Untethered ROV (UROV) platform is unique in its approach to this problem. Around high value producing assets, a higher level of supervision than “launch and forget” is needed. Thus, the UROV platform is based on supervised autonomy wherein a “human in the loop” has real-time feedback from onboard sensors and is then able to update the operation.

This talk will present the novel sensor architecture embedded on the UROV platform to enable this vision. Results include a first demonstration of remote visualization and control of subsea LiDAR over acoustic telemetry. Extensions under development will enable remote mapping of infrastructure surface temperatures as well as detection and localization of potential hydrocarbon leaks. I will lastly present progress towards using the data generated by these sensors for localization and cluttered environment navigation to safely approach high value assets.