Abstract
The demand for non-powered facility towing is increasing with the development of large-scale offshore projects. It is of great interest for its safe operation to measure the state of the towing process in real time. This paper proposed a computer vision algorithm designed to measure the tug yawing during the towing operation by estimating the towing line angle. The geometrical projection of the towing line from 3D to 2D is described in detail. By fixing the camera at specific locations and simplifying the calculation procedure, the towing line angle in the 3D world can be estimated by the line angle in the image. Firstly, the sea–sky line is detected to estimate the rolling angle of the tug in the captured image. Then, the towing line angle is calculated by an image processing method. At the same time, the estimation of the towing angle is achieved through the captured video data analysis. Finally, field experiments were carried out and the results demonstrated that this method is suitable for real-time calculation of the towing angle during the towing operation.
Highlights
The towing operation of non-powered facilities at sea has developed rapidly to promote marine exploration, deep sea farming, and meet other marine engineering needs
There has been an urgent need for industrial development to ensure the safety and reduce the risk of towing operations at sea [1]
Due to the sea’s weather conditions, the tug and the towed facility would swing in the scheduled route during the non-powered facility towing voyage, which is the yawing problem of the towing operation
Summary
The towing operation of non-powered facilities at sea has developed rapidly to promote marine exploration, deep sea farming, and meet other marine engineering needs. Marine breeding platforms, and other non-powered equipment are huge in size Their hydrodynamics is quite complex and hard to model precisely, especially under the influence of wind, waves, tides, and other natural environmental factors. When the towing angle becomes larger, the transverse drag moment generated by the drag force will become larger, which would increase the wear and stress concentration of the towing line. In this case, the difficulty of the towing operation would increase; the towing line might even break, causing serious accidents [2]. The main contribution of this paper is that a computer vision-based method is proposed for the towing angle measurement, which contributes to the safety of the non-powered sea platform towing operation.
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