Page 31: of Marine Technology Magazine (May 2021)

arti? cial intelligence and machine learning for its mission and

Challenges situation awareness autonomy.

It may seem like these vehicles have had a smooth jour-

L3Harris’s 5.5m-long, diesel powered C-Worker 5, de- ney to industry adoption. However, customers have had to signed to operate for up to seven days at 7 knots, with a vari- get over a misperception that the survey data they gather is ety of payloads, including multibeam sonar, side scan sonar somehow inferior to that obtained from a traditional crewed and sub-bottom pro? lers, has become a regular hydrographic vessel, says Williams. In fact, the data quality is often better – survey platform. “Since 2015, a NOAA contractor uses our C-Worker 5 as well as safer and less expensive to acquire, he says. Many also think it means people are not involved, when USVs are platform each year in Alaska as a force multiplier, with over actually controlled by people in remote operations centres 20,000km of operational experience to date, to update nautical (ROCs), says Simpson. charts in remote areas,” says Williams. L3harris USVs have

There are other misconceptions to overcome. Initially, many also been used to update nautical charts along Florida’s Gulf looked at USVs as toys, says Eudeline. But, when customers

Coast for NOAA. “There are intentions to use the same class then test and use it, they see they can reduce margins down, of vehicle to do a similar job for the Australian Hydrographic get better data and do less post processing and that it’s reliable.

Of? ce off the country’s south coast,” he adds.

Now the challenge is that customers keep asking for more and more capabilities, and of course they want it yesterday.

People also always ask about redundancy – what happens if

XOCEAN something goes wrong or you lose connectivity, says de Jong.

Founded in 2017, XOCEAN has done more than 100 proj- “There are a lot of redundancies in the systems we develop; ects, largely covering bathymetric surveys for hydrographic there’s no single point of failure in communication or con- of? ces and site-investigation surveys, many for offshore wind trol. A lot of people don’t realise how far the technology is companies, with its XO-450, a 4.5m-long diesel-electric USV already,” he says. “We can operate an ROV in 1,500 m of wa- with 18-day/1,512m-range, at 4kts. ter on northwest shelf of Australia from our Aberdeen ROC.”

It recently delivered a site investigation survey on Ørsted’s

Hornsea One Offshore Wind Farm, the world’s biggest off- shore wind farm. One of its XO-450s was launched and re-

Communications covered from shore, transiting over 120km to the survey loca-

Still, there’s some concern about communications during tion to complete the survey in up to 1.9m max wave heights, longer missions. “We’re providing cleaner data, which needs providing high-resolution seabed data in 30m water depth, less post-processing, but what do we do with that huge amount says XOCEAN.

of data?” says Eudeline. The options are to store and retrieve

The ? rm has its sights on growth. Having doubled its staff to it, at the end of a mission, or use costly satellite communica- 82 over the last 12 months, it’s on target to quadruple revenue tions. It’s a challenge iXblue and others are trying to address in 2021 and is looking to grow its ? eet from 14 USVs to 40 by though bandwidth exploitation. the end of next year (2022).

Kongsberg’s Seatex Maritime Broadband Radio (MBR) of- fers high bandwidth communications and direct control over

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