Omerdic E, Toal D, Nolan S, Ahmad H

2012 January

Further Advances in Unmanned Marine Vehicles

ROV LATIS: Next Generation Smart Underwater Vehicle, Chapter 2

Inst of Engineering & Technology

London

Published

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Deployment, installation and maintenance of ocean energy devices require use of underwater robots and support vessels that are also used by other offshore industry, for example, oil and gas. These vessels may be very expensive and, moreover, their costs are very volatile, depending on offshore peak demands. Thus, it is important to address the requirements for vessels to be used in ocean energy deployments and  how these requirements may be configured to reduce the costs of these vessels and, simultaneously, affect technology development.
According to Richard Vandervoort, chief of ROV operation and underwater robotics, Marine Institute, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, ‘the only real automatic controls present on modern work-class ROVs, used in offshore oil and gas exploration, are auto heading, auto depth and auto altitude. It really depends on pilot skills to do good piloting.’ Challenges faced by ROV pilots during deep water operations include low visibility, time-varying ocean currents and umbilical drag effects.
The research team at the Mobile & Marine Robotics Research Centre, University of Limerick, has developed the MPPT Ring, a set of hardware/software components that should be installed on an ROV and inside the Control Cabin, in order to increase level of automation, to make ROV operations easier and to save expensive ship time by 20% or more. Research outputs of the project are applicable to the growing international offshore oil and gas sector, and also for future deployment, monitoring and maintenance of ocean energy devices (in particular, wave energy converters and tidal turbines).
A major component of the system, designed as a prototype platform to demonstrate system validity and operability and to prove new technologies developed in the Mobile & Marine Robotics Research Centre, is a smart remotely operated vehicle ROV LATIS. It is a next generation smart ROV with unique features, including multiple modes of operation, advanced 2D and 3D displays, intuitive and easy to use pilot interface and fault-tolerant control system. System validation and technology demonstration was performed through a series of test trials with different support vessels off the west coast of Ireland, in Galway Bay and in the Shannon Estuary. This chapter highlights the main features of the system, presents selected results of test trials and discusses implementation issues and potential benefits of the technology.                           

ISBN-10: 1849194793,

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