by David Foxwell
With three kids all now driving I have mixed feelings about driverless cars. Instinctively, I find the concept of an unattended vehicle travelling at high speed worrying, but perhaps the next car I buy our youngest might be driverless. Maybe she’d be safer in a driverless vehicle. Maybe we all would.
But how do you feel about driverless ships? Instinctively, I’m against the idea and I imagine that a lot of people in what is, by and large, a very conservative shipping industry probably are too. Who wants an unmanned 5,000-tonne platform supply vessel (PSV) approaching a rig with a live well? Any offshore unit might be at risk from something going wrong. Not so long ago I wrote about a study that looked at the potential impact of a PSV running into a jack-up. PSVs have grown in size and the force levels in a potential collision have grown significantly too. But as we all also know, human factors – that is, human failures – play a huge role in casualties of all types. Maybe unmanned ships might be safer.
Wherever you stand on the issue, unmanned units of one type or another are here already. We have all grown accustomed to remotely operated vehicles (ROVs); increasingly autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are doing the work that was the preserve of the ROV. Modus, a company in the UK is offering a hybrid autonomous underwater vehicle that, it claims, has the capabilities and characteristics of a ROV.
Delegates at the 2017 Annual OSJ Conference, Awards & Exhibition in London earlier this month heard that the first autonomous offshore support vessel will be delivered in 2018; they also heard that DNV GL is working on rule requirements for autonomous vessels and is working with Rolls-Royce and Inmarsat on the development of autonomous vessel technology. Damen Shipyards’ project manager Bas Blaak said the company is developing many of the technologies that would be required for remotely controlled and autonomous vessels.
That leads me to the attention grabbing, tongue-in-cheek headline of this comment, and to news that Eelume AS in Norway, a spin-off from the Norwegian University of Science & Technology has released the first live video footage of its new underwater intervention vehicles.
With the support of Kongsberg Maritime as a development partner, Eelume has torn up the marine robotics rulebook to create a futuristic, snake-like vehicle designed to live permanently underwater and carry out underwater intervention tasks that would normally require the mobilisation of ships or divers or to launch and retrieve ROVs (or AUVs).
The footage captured at the PREZIOSO Linjebygg Subsea Test Center during trials in the Trondheimsfjord demonstrated the potential of the Eelume vehicle in inspection and light intervention operations. The modular, snake-like design allows the Eelume vehicle to access hard-to-reach points on subsea structures; its ability to shift into a U-shaped ‘dual arm’ configuration enables it to interact with subsea infrastructure in new ways, using torque tools, grippers and specialised maintenance equipment. The trials verified and demonstrated the features of Eelume’s snake-like underwater robot in a deepwater environment, and confirmed the vehicle’s super-high level of manoeuvrability. “The Eelume solution will dramatically reduce costs by reducing the use of expensive surface vessels,” says the company. I could believe it might one day, which is good in one respect but a little scary if you own a high-spec, high cost ship designed for inspection, maintenance and repair.
It’s fascinating, and really drives home just how far autonomous systems have evolved, and how significant their role is likely to be when the market picks up again. One day, maybe I’ll buy my daughter an autonomous vehicle after all.
Did you subscribe for our daily newsletter?
It’s Free! Click here to Subscribe!
Source: Offshore Support Journal, Kongsberg Gruppen
