Page 40: of Marine Technology Magazine (September 2022)

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Ocean In? nity https://oceanin? nity.com/

Image courtesy Ocean In? nity

Ocean In? nity is going even bigger with its emerging Ar- Phil Hart, Survey Systems Integration Specialist, at mada Fleet. Ocean In? nity’s ? rst 78m vessel is undergoing Ocean In? nity, says it’s enabling as much acquisition and commissioning and expected to start work early next year, processing work ? ow as possible to be done on the vessels, initially targeting projects in European waters. This will be only transmitting small amounts of data for quality control under a lean crew, which is expected to accompany it for in near real time to validate collected data speci? cation at least a few years. Its ? rst two, 21m vessels maybe out and quality. It’s also about using and share communica- late this year/early next year. The second two 21m vessels tions bandwidth smartly, so there’s a hierarchy of control will follow, followed by its 36m vessels. As well as greater with navigation at the top, followed by dynamic things like ? xed sensor payloads, these vessels will have capability ROV control.

to tow traditional side scan sonar and magnetometer sen- “Once we have that really robust control infrastructure, sors and host ROVs and AUVs, says Michael King, Sales we can cover the ship, as well as the subsea environment and Business Development, Ocean In? nity. UAV support with ROVs and geophysical and hydrographic sensors,” is also in the plan. King says. “We can cover the aerial and topside environ-

Shorter-term, the company has a ? eet of 8m L3Harris ment with drones and laser scanning and bring that all into

C-Worker USVs and, following its acquisition of iXblue one operational solution, all monitored through one con-

Australia, two DriX on order for delivery later this year. nection to the remote control centre, giving a complete

Ocean In? nity’s larger vessels are “a very different ball holistic view of an offshore wind farm. That’s what we’re game”, says King. “Once you’ve got those platforms in trying to achieve, but it’s a long-term future goal.” place you can use them for an awful lot of things,” not Changing the way data is gathered and handled also opens least operating in deeper, harsher waters, but also for lon- up new ways of working and operating – from moving ger with fewer port calls. But the “whole robotics control away from vessel chartering for a survey to cloud-based and network infrastructure” is also critical. data processing and multi-client missions, adds Jones.

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