Performance Period: 2013 – Ongoing
Work at sea is extremely expensive; even for small inspection tasks, large vessels have to be mobilized to deploy manned intervention strategies. The cost of these operations contribute significantly to the cost of electricity from these offshore power plants, especially during the early phases of industry development. Unmanned and remotely operated vehicle technology has made significant progress over the past five years. With funding from the US Department of Energy, Re Vision Consulting is developing an autonomous vehicle platform that can be used to carry out a range of inspection and subsea intervention tasks – reducing intervention cost for some operations by an order of magnitude. It will address critical technical barriers related to the practical operation of these vehicles in the harsh offshore environment and enable a cost-reduction pathway that is a critical component of lowering the O&M cost of marine renewable energy installations.
We work with a wide range of SW and hardware platforms but are fond of low cost open-source platforms including the Robot Operating System (ROS), edge computing to run various AI-based algorithms to process sensor data, and the PX4 ecosystem to handle low-level control of drone navigation.
