Abstract
The offshore wind power industry is an emerging and exponentially growing sector, which calls to a necessity for a cyclical monitoring and inspection to ensure the safety and efficiency of the wind farm facilities. Thus, the emersed (aerial) and immersed (underwater) scenarios must be reconstructed to create a more complete and reliable map that maximizes the observability of all the offshore structures from the wind turbines to the cable arrays, presenting a multi domain scenario.This work proposes the use of an Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) to map both domains simultaneously. As such, it will produce a multi-domain map through the fusion of navigational sensors, GPS and IMU, to localize the vehicle and aid the registration process for the perception sensors, 3D Lidar and Multibeam echosounder sonar. The performed experiments demonstrate the ability of the multi-domain mapping architecture to provide an accurate reconstruction of both scenarios into a single representation using the odometry system as the initial seed to further improve the map with data filtering and registration processes. An error of 0.049 m for the odometry estimation is observed with the GPS/IMU fusion for simulated data and 0.07 m for real field tests. The multi-domain map methodology requires an average of 300 ms per iteration to reconstruct the environment, with an error of at most 0.042 m in simulation.
Highlights
The offshore wind power industry is an emerging and exponentially growing sector expected to be the main source of energy in a near future, where Europe is currently the leader of this initiative due to the wind energy potential in shallow waters that is available in the NorthSea [2]
The environment takes into account both emersed and immersed scenarios to be inspected using with a model of the SENSE, shown in Fig. 2b, including all the onboard sensors, namely the GPS, IMU, Lidar and multibeam echosounder (MBES)
This trajectory performs the following steps: 1. Autonomous Surface Vehicle (ASV) starts berthed on a dock
Summary
The offshore wind power industry is an emerging and exponentially growing sector expected to be the main source of energy in a near future, where Europe is currently the leader of this initiative due to the wind energy potential in shallow waters that is available in the North. The research presented in this work, extended from [1], proposes the use of a single ASV equipped with navigation sensors (GPS and IMU) and perception sensors (3D Lidar and a Multibeam echosounder sonar, MBES) to perform real-time survey tasks for both emersed and immersed regions simultaneously It allows the creation of a complete 3D representation of the scenario that can be used for visual inspection or, even, to enhance the information provided to obstacle avoidance and autonomous docking techniques.
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