Page 33: of Offshore Engineer Magazine (May/Jun 2024)

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Ocean Infinity has iDROP’s Oceanid OBNs entered the offshore wind to communicate with geotechnical market with its others in the swarm newly developed autonomous and with the ship, cone penetration test (CPT) using acoustics. device, Infinity CPT 250.

Source: Ocean Infnity

Source: iDROP ter and the cloud. Infnity CPT can receive mission state- from the sensors will also be used to supervise or monitor ments and execute them with minimal supervision. The the status of the robot and to allow the human monitor to data is automatically processed and reported to clients. intervene if needed from a remote location.

Galbraith sees a future where geotechnical drilling and As more offshore operations are completed and Ocean sampling will evolve towards fully autonomous operations Infnity’s systems are proven to be effective and reliable, they on the seafoor. This includes autonomous Ocean Drills will require less supervision. For example, part of the control capable of investigating the sub-seabed independently, system for Ocean Drill includes a product called Smart Drill retrieving and storing soil samples with minimal human which will eventually replace the need for a human driller intervention. Intelligent control system software will facili- who makes operational decisions. Smart Drill relies on a tate this autonomous functionality, requiring only a mis- training data set relevant to a target borehole to plan and sion statement for the robot to complete tasks optimally. drill it in an effcient way with minimal supervision.

Robots such as Ocean Infnity’s Ocean Drill or SoniCor- Ultimately, the Amada vessels themselves will operate er rely on an array of sensors that are used by algorithms to without any onboard crew. They will use zero emission allow the robot to interface with the environment that it fuel and perform offshore data acquisition and interven- encounters during the completion of a given task. The data tion operations down to depths of 6,000 meters.

MAy/june 2024 OFFSHORE ENGINEER 33