Abstract
In recent years, we have seen significant interest in the use of permanently deployed resident robotic vehicles for commercial inspection, maintenance and repair (IMR) activities. This paper presents a concept and demonstration, through offshore trials, of a low-cost, low-maintenance, navigational marker that can eliminate drift in vehicle INS solution when the vehicle is close to the IMR target. The subsea localisation marker system is fixed on location on the resident field asset and is used in on-vehicle machine vision algorithms for pose estimation and facilitation of a high-resolution world coordinate frame registration with a high refresh rate. This paper presents evaluation of the system during trials in the North Atlantic Ocean during January 2019. System performances and propagation of position error is inspected and estimated, and the effect of intermittent visual based position update to Kalman filter and onboard INS solution is discussed. The paper presents experimental results of the commercial state-of-the-art inertial navigation system operating in the pure inertial mode for comparison.
Highlights
In recent years, we have seen the conceptual introduction of resident robotic platforms to underwater inspection, maintenance and repair (IMR) activities within the oil and gas sector
The position error is estimated based on the integration of the Inertial measurement unit (IMU) data, it depends on the quality of the fibre optics gyroscope (FOG) and accelerometers
In case of Ultra-short baseline (USBL) signal loss, while PHINS operates in pure inertial mode, the visual pose estimation data could be used as the intermittent inertial navigation systems (INS) position update to reduce the position error and to allow for transition of the subsea vehicle towards another known landmark or area covered with the
Summary
We have seen the conceptual introduction of resident robotic platforms to underwater inspection, maintenance and repair (IMR) activities within the oil and gas sector. One of the primary benefits to this approach was shown to be the extended operational weather windows which can be achieved through having system deployments available on the seabed at all times This extended weather capabilities has hugely significant benefits, not just to oil and gas and to the offshore wind sector, which has seen the rollout of many large infrastructure projects off European waters in recent years. The concerning issue in this solution is drift over time which in a commercial state-of-the-art system is 0.1% of distance travelled [13,14] This is not an acceptable error rate for subsea operations requiring close-quarter IMR activities. System performances and propagation of position error are inspected and estimated, and the effect of intermittent visual based position update is discussed
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