Page 31: of Offshore Engineer Magazine (Mar/Apr 2022)

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in representative environments.”

Communications

That included landing a drone on the USV, which in-

To make all this work, these multiple robots will need cluded developing a global mission planning software that communications. A future plan is for each wind farm to communicated everything to the drone and also the mov- have its own communication platform connected to shore ing turbine camera system – which had just been an idea and then within the wind farm local wireless connections at the start of the project. A deployment system was devel- for the ecosystem of other robots operating in that envi- oped for the drone to carry a crawler (an early prototype ronment, says Corsar. of a BladeBUG was used), but this had to content with “The hub on the farm would provide more than just weight limitations enforced by the U.K.’s Civil Aviation communications, it would provide the power for the

Authority (which was reduced to 25Kg during the project). crawlers and low hanging fruit in this space is the UAVs,” “We can see there are short term opportunities that could he says. “For our platform, it would probably be a low be focused on and brought to commercialization sooner earth satellite link to shore, as it will be more ubiquitous to and other considerations more to do with manipulation use sat comms rather than farm by farm basis communica- and repair that are a bit further on,” says Macdonald. tions. But it will have bandwidth concerns, so it’s on us to

An early win is to perform more drone inspection remotely develop control systems that are not required to pass big via USVs, he says, although there are some hurdles around amounts of data.” regulations, Maritime Coastguard Agency considerations and

But there’s some way to go yet before this vision is real- licensing on USVs and beyond visual line of sight operations. ized. Amphibian has gained traction in the oil and gas sec- “I think wind farm developers are keen to see innova- tor, despite having been designed for offshore wind. “Oil tions like this, robotics is an innovation area that’s here and gas is very much more mature around integrity man- to stay and something they want to see robust and com- agement. Offshore wind isn’t quite as mature in inspection mercial enough to be a solution,” says Macdonald. “Seeing requirements and inspection techniques. It’s a younger in- projects like MIMRee is really helpful. I think there are dustry still ? nding its feet. Equally its assets are younger aspects that could be realized in the shorter term that they and not falling to pieces. So there are a number of factors would be keen to explore also.” holding us back [in offshore wind].”

Thales march/april 2022 OFFSHORE ENGINEER 31