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SUBSEA Resident Subsea eering does expect to use both the current design docking station What’re the next steps?

as well as docking stations designed for better protection of the After SPE Offshore Europe, our Freedom vehicle will be vehicle and higher capabilities within tooling storage that can shipped to Norway, where it will undergo commissioning tri- add more value to the concept of underwater drones. als, ? rst in our test tank and then later at our Living Lab. We are currently building a mock-up of the current open-source

What’s the latest with Freedom? docking station design. This will be installed at our Living

Oceaneering has set up what we call our Living Lab in a Lab for further development of auto docking and communica- fjord in Norway. The location enables us to run daily testing tions and charging through inductive technology.

of our software, both in very shallow water, but also in water depths of up to 300 meters. We use the facility and the test ve- Finally, what has the E-ROV concept (also dubbed ‘Liberty’) hicle to evaluate software packages as they are being created been doing?

by our internal software development team. In order to ensure The E-ROV has been deployed a number of times now and we maintain the development pace we are working in two has already proved its usability as an IMR solution for light time zones. The software team is in the US where they can work scopes. As with all new technology, we have of course develop new software and ready it for our Living Lab team experienced technical challenges in the initial phases, but to upload to the vehicle ? rst thing in the morning. Once our so far nothing we haven’t been able to solve. We expect this

US software team starts their day, they effectively have a full ? rst E-ROV to become a great value asset for our customers day’s testing available to dig into and improve their code. This and we do expect that this concept, which we have formally process has enabled us to make great strides. named Liberty, will be developed further.

September/OctoBER 2019 OFFSHORE ENGINEER 27