ROV Operations Research Articles

Development and Field Testing of a Smart Support System for ROV Operators

The article considers the issues of development of a smart system for supporting activities of ROV operators and its practical implementation for the efficient operation a ROV Comanche 18 that is based on the R/V Akademik M.A. Lavrentiev. The system uses algorithms that provide coordinated movements of the ROV and its depressor unit. These algorithms are designed for ROVs to make synchronous, accurate, and accident-free movements along long-distance routes even when launched from a support vessel without dynamic positioning (DP). For this, the operator receives real-time visual recommendations and warnings generated on the basis of the expert evaluation of information coming from various sensors and positioning systems. The ability to plan routes of the ROV and its mothership, inputting target points, saving maps, tracks, and locations of the detected underwater objects are also implemented in the designed system. The article presents the results of successful tests carried out during a deep-sea research expedition of the A.V. Zhirmunsky National Scientific Center of Marine Biology FEB RAS in the Bering Sea and Pacific Ocean. The created smart support system for ROV operators significantly extends the range of capabilities of ROVs performing many unique underwater operations, while significantly reducing their operating time.

Simplified Method on Obtaining Extreme Multidirectional Current Profile from a Current Database for Deep-water ROV Operation

Simplified Method on Obtaining Extreme Multidirectional Current Profile from a Current Database for Deep-water ROV Operation

Haptic shared control applied for ROV operation support in flowing water

Haptic shared control applied for ROV operation support in flowing water

On the theory and application of absolute coordinates-based multibody modelling of the rigid–flexible coupled dynamics of a deep-sea ROV-TMS (tether management system) integrated model

This paper presents a novel method to investigate the dynamics between the interconnected rigid and very flexible bodies of a deep-sea ROV-TMS with highly coupled dynamics. The aim is to develop an accurate yet effective system model, which is applicable to a wide range of deep-sea working-class ROV applications. The use of different sets of generalized coordinates in rigid–flexible multibody system usually leads to complex forms of constraints Jacobian and quadratic velocity vector when the interconnected rigid and flexible bodies share highly coupled dynamics. Thus, the compatibility of the formulations used in modelling is pivotal to a correct representation of the dynamics of an underwater multibody system with highly coupled dynamics. To this end, a mixed formulation, which is fully-based on absolute coordinates, is presented in modelling the dynamics of underwater tethered vehicle system. The development of system model of a basic ROV-TMS and theoretical implementations are presented in this paper. The applicability of the presented model is assessed through numerical simulations for the realistic scenarios during the deep-sea ROV operations. The numerical studies show that the proposed model is able to capture the nonlinear dynamics of cable and cable drum, and the nonlinear coupling dynamics between the tether cable and the ROV.

Motion Planning for Cable Management in ASV and ROV Cooperation System

In order to prevent the tether cable from adversely affecting the ROV’s motion performance and cable entanglement during ROV operation, the cable must be properly routed according to the direction and depth of the ROV in the water. In this study, we propose a motion plan for the position of the ASV and the cable length with the motion of the ROV in the ASV-ROV cooperative system.

Experimental Verification of Haptic Shared Control for ROV Operation Support

Experimental Verification of Haptic Shared Control for ROV Operation Support

A mesopelagic ctenophore representing a new family, with notes on family-level taxonomy in Ctenophora: Vampyroctena delmarvensis gen. nov. sp. nov. (Vampyroctenidae, fam. nov.)

The stunning diversity of midwater ctenophores is well-known to veterans of oceanographic cruises and ROV operations, but many species lack formal descriptions, leading to taxonomic confusion and a systematic underestimation of the biodiversity of the mesopelagic zone. Here, we present a description of a novel genus and species of one such ctenophore, Vampyroctena delmarvensis gen. nov. sp. nov. This cydippid ctenophore, the sole described representative of Vampyroctenidae fam. nov. (Class Tentaculata, Order Cydippida), was collected in mesopelagic waters off the coast of Delaware in the northwest Atlantic Ocean and has a characteristic bright red mesoglea, large paragastric diverticulae, deep red macrocilia, and a darkly pigmented gut. A molecular phylogenetic analysis of Ctenophora based on transcriptomic data places V. delmarvensis gen. nov. sp. nov. as the closest known relative to Euplokamis dunlapae Mills, 1987 (Euplokamididae), in a clade that is sister to all other ctenophore lineages.

An assessment of fish and marine growth associated with an oil and gas platform jacket using an augmented remotely operated vehicle

Scientists, industry and regulators are seeking to understand the influence of oil and gas infrastructure in our oceans to mitigate its impacts and maximise environmental benefits. This project equipped a standard work-class ROV with a light-weight stereo-video camera system to collect high definition imagery of fish and habitats formed by marine growth associated with Woodside Energy's Goodwyn Alpha Platform jacket (GWA) 138 km offshore of Dampier, north-west Australia. ROV video surveys were rapidly performed by industry on four faces of the GWA jacket, from the surface to the seabed at 130 m, yielding 1 h and 14 min of imagery. The stereo-video cameras continued to film during standard ROV operations collecting a further 150 h of HD imagery, used to build a comprehensive fish species list. A total of 8676 individual fish from at least 57 species and 20 families, with an estimated combined mass of 8719 kg, were recorded from the vertical transects of four faces of the jacket. An additional 43 fish species from 21 families were recorded via rapid assessment of a subset of the additional, standard ROV operations imagery. The jacket was characterised by abundant Caranx sexfasciatus (bigeye trevally), Pseudanthias spp. (basslets), Heniochus diphreutes (schooling bannerfish), Labridae sp. (wrasse) and Acanthurus spp. (surgeonfish). Several fish important to the demersal scalefish fishery in the region were observed, including: Lutjanus argentimaculatus (mangrove jack), Lutjanus erythropterus (crimson snapper), Lutjanus malabaricus (saddletail snapper), Lutjanus russellii (Moses' snapper). Eleven broad marine growth types were observed with encrusting/enveloping species (brown algae, filamentous mat, coralline algae, calcite) and hard corals (Tubastrea sp.) present in the greatest coverage. Both marine growth and fish assemblages changed markedly with depth. The addition of a lightweight stereo-video system to an industrial ROV and the allocation of short amounts of time for rapid vertical surveys provided important information on the ecology of an oil and gas platform jacket. Future industrial ROV campaigns should consider utilising this approach to gather scientific information that may have value in the context of decommissioning comparative assessments and, more generally, improves our understanding of the impact of oil and gas infrastructure in our oceans.

Norway Faces Up to Harsh Conditions

Offshore Norway is an unlikely spot for optimism. The continental shelf is home to a mature basin, with harsh sea conditions, a reputation for high costs, and an exploration frontier well north of the Arctic Circle. Last year’s version of low oil prices, when benchmark crudes traded for around USD 50/bbl, led to news stories in Norway pointing out that the shares of the 10 largest local oil-industry-related companies, excluding Statoil, were worth less than the 10 biggest aquaculture companies. While raising salmon is expected to grow into a big business, with big oil industry suppliers such as Kongsberg working on high-tech tools to raise millions of fish, those working in the oil business are not talking about a career change. “Oil [/bbl] is selling for the same prices as 4.5 kilo salmon. We could all start farming salmon, but I do not think so,” said Arve Iverson, ROV operations manager for Oceaneering, at the recent Subsea Valley Conference in Oslo. The show put on by the organization created to increase the visibility of the engineering-driven oil industry in southeast Norway, also amounted to a rally in support of the future of oil offshore Norway, and the global markets these companies_serve. Eldar Sætre, the chief executive officer (CEO) of Statoil, pointed out that the national oil company has lowered its average break-even cost for new projects from USD 70/bbl to USD 40/bbl, and emphasized that the bulk of the improvement was in savings that will remain after supplier discounts are gone. The themes of standardization, simplifying requirements, and working together were common ones when hearing from oil industry experts. The test of whether the Norwegian industry can deliver on its goal of profitably producing oil in a era of low prices, is the Johan Sverdrup field, a multibillion-barrel find which is moving forward in the midst of the slump, showcasing innovations backed by the Norwegian government and Statoil.

Dexterous Undersea Interventions with Far Distance Onshore Supervision: the DexROV Project

Abstract: The operation of a ROV requires significant off-shore dedicated manpower to handle and operate the robotic platform. In order to reduce the burden of operations, DexROV proposes to work out more cost effective and time efficient ROV operations, where manned support is in a large extent delocalized onshore (i.e. from a ROV control center), possibly at a large distance from the actual operations, relying on satellite communications. The proposed scheme makes provision for advanced dexterous manipulation capabilities, exploiting human expertise from a remote location when deemed useful. The outcomes of the project will be integrated and evaluated in a series of tests and evaluation campaigns, culminating with a realistic deep sea (1,300 meters) trial. After one year, the project specified the system architecture of the system and carried out preliminary technological trade-offs for the subsystems.

Towards autonomy in ROV operations

This paper presents an on-going research project focusing on the development of technology to enable autonomy in ROV operations. The project is a collaborative project between Norwegian offshore industry and academia. Currently, there is a large focus in research on the development of navigation, guidance and control for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV). This is important as there will be a future demand for subsea inspection, maintenance and repair (IMR) operations with non-cabled systems. A future scenario is to have AUVs stationed on the seafloor in subsea garages. However, state of the art for IMR operations on the Norwegian Continental Shelf is to apply vessel supported ROVs in IMR operations. Efficiency in such operations will imply large cost and time savings. Increased autonomy enables the ROV operator to shift from manual to automatic control utilizing autonomous functions for a number of specific tasks. The research project presented in this paper is novel and the goal is to improve the capabilities of the ROV leaving the operator mainly to supervise operation. The paper discusses different aspects of the technology requirements. This may be useful for researchers working in the area of AUV research, relating this research to industrial needs. The presented project will develop novel integrated sensor platforms with robust perception methods and collision-free motion planning algorithms for subsea inspection and light intervention operations. Moreover, the project will also focus on subsea factory design enabling autonomous operations. The results will be tested, verified and demonstrated in full-scale test beds, as well as at an offshore location.

Outlier Rejection in Underwater Acoustic Position Measurements Based on Prediction Errors

Outlier detection and rejection is an important step toward more robust underwater navigation systems. More specifically, acoustic positioning measurements can be notoriously intractable by introducing spikes, or freezing for periods of time, hence driving the navigation filter state estimates to wrong values. In this paper, a simple approach for detecting and rejecting outliers for underwater operations is presented. Acoustic positioning measurements are combined with absolute velocity measurements from a DVL (Doppler Velocity Log) sensor in order to robustify the filter when the vehicle navigates in the operative range of the DVL. Simple x2 statistic tests are employed in order to evaluate every new measurement and result in discarding those measurements which give large residuals compared to the predicted value from the Extended Kalman Filter. Moreover, the sum of the prediction errors is computed over a fixed number of valid acoustic measurements for filter divergence monitoring purposes. The efficacy of the approach is demonstrated using experimental data acquired during ROV operations.

DexROV: Dexterous Undersea Inspection and Maintenance in Presence of Communication Latencies

Underwater inspection and maintenance (e.g. in the oil & gas industry) are demanding and costly activities for which ROV based setups are often deployed in addition or in substitution to deep divers - contributing to operations risks and costs cutting. However the operation of a ROV requires significant off-shore dedicated manpower to handle and operate the robotic platform. In order to reduce the burden of operations, DexROV proposes to work out more cost effective and time efficient ROV operations, where manned support is in a large extent delocalized onshore (i.e. from a ROV control center), possibly at a large distance from the actual operations, relying on satellite communications. The proposed scheme also makes provision for advanced dexterous manipulation capabilities, exploiting human expertise when deemed useful. The outcomes of the project will be integrated and evaluated in a series of tests and evaluation campaigns, culminating with a realistic deep sea (1,300 meters) trial.

The formation of the concept of robotic monitoring of an underwater environment based on the use of remotely operated vehicles

To date, water resources monitoring in Ukraine is almost not performed. Major monitoring work is carried out without the use of specialized monitoring systems, though Ukraine has experience in applying remotely operated vehicles. For a more effective monitoring of an underwater environment, it is necessary to create the concept of remotely operated vehicle that could meet the underwater environment lighting requirements.Existing monitoring tasks were classified into the four groups according to the scope of application. Each group has common, relative to the control system and specific tasks. Since the tasks to be performed by the control system, have common operation modes, there is the possibility to develop its generalized structure.Generalized hierarchical structure of the automatic control system of remotely operated vehicle was developed to perform the underwater environment monitoring tasks. It contains three levels: strategic, tactical and executive. Implementing individual blocks of this structure is complex scientific and technical problem. The most promising is the use of artificial intelligence tools in the synthesis of elements of these blocks.Intelligent components of the automatic control system ensure reduction of load on ROV operators and underwater environment monitoring efficiency improvement.

Subsurface Oil and Waves in The Coastal Zone

Over the last decade, there have been more and more oil spill responses effected by subsurface waves in the coastal zone. These have ranged from oil leaking from sunken ships to heavy oils that have sunk to the bottom. A primary example is the DBL 152 incident on the Gulf of Mexico coast in November, 2006. The incident resulted in approximately 70,000 barrels of Slurry Oil (API 4) being released and sinking to the bottom. Waves played a significant role in the mobilization of the oil on the bottom, in addition to effecting sediment loading in the subsurface, often restricting visibility and making ROV operations difficult. Waves can also play a major role disturbing sunken ships, and evidenced by the SS Jacob Luckenbach, sunken off San Francisco during WWII. The ship was a source of occasional incidents of oiled birds washing ashore after certain winter storms. The oil on the ship was removed as part of a major remediation effort in the summer of 2002.The oil spill response community will be more effective, particularly with subsurface oils, with a better understanding of the role of waves on the mobilization of sediment and other deposited substances (such as subsurface oil). This paper provides an overview of wave mechanics and the implications for subsurface oil movement and spill response activities, using examples from the DBL 152, SS Jacob Luckenbach, and other recent incidents. Shortcomings of current understanding will be highlighted, with suggestions for future research offered.

Optimal docking pose and tactile hook-localisation strategy for AUV intervention: The DIFIS deployment case

The DIFIS project has proposed a new solution for the immediate intervention directly on tanker wrecks so as to contain any leakages and prevent eventual pollution. The method could be extended also to oil well-blow-out cases such as the recent accident in the Gulf of Mexico. The DIFIS deployment typically requires the use of ROVs and dedicated dynamic-positioning ships that increase the cost significantly and make the operations weather-dependent. Eventual AUV use would result in much more efficient and flexible deployment procedures. The scenario studied here consists of a hook-grasping task that is part of the DIFIS mooring procedure. The overall objective is to automate certain processes enabling the use of AUVs or, at least, enhancing the currently foreseen ROV operations. A two-step method is presented consisting of a genetic algorithm for the determination of the optimum docking pose for the vehicle, and a particle filter algorithm that runs on a later stage for the tactile localisation of the hook. The method proposed is rather generic and can be extended to several steps of the DIFIS Deployment procedure, or even to other AUV intervention missions in a semi-structured environment. Results from the two algorithms are also presented and discussed.

Smart ROV LATIS in Action: Sea Trials

ROV LATIS is a next generation smart ROV with multiple modes of operation: Surface-Tow Mode, Surface-Thrusted Mode, ROV Operation Mode & ROV Submerged Tow in Strong Currents Mode. It is designed as a prototype platform to demonstrate system validity & operability and to prove new technologies developed in the Mobile and Marine Robotics Research Centre. Research outcomes are applicable to the growing international off-shore oil and gas sector, and also for future deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of ocean energy devices (in particular - wave energy converters and tidal turbines). System validation and technology demonstration was performed through a series of test trials with different support vessels off the west coast of Ireland. Selected results of the most recent field trials are presented in this paper.

Joystick in Closed-loop Control of ROVs with Experimental Results

In standard ROV operations a joystick command console is used for positioning control. The joystick command console controls the propeller speed of each thruster. A thrust allocation may be used for manual control in surge, sway, heave and yaw. Accurate station keeping or high precision moves require a skilled and concentrated pilot. Some ROV tasks, such as station keeping and trajectory tracking, can be automated by a closed-loop positioning control system. However, for tasks such as inspection of an unknown object or complex manipulation work, the desired trajectory is not known in advance, and must be decided by a pilot based on view from ROV cameras or other sensor data. In that case, the pilot should have an easy way of guiding the ROV without spending a lot of effort on the positioning control itself. The low level position control should be automated by a controller that compensates for ROV dynamics and environmental loads. A joystick with closed-loop control functions is proposed in this paper. Joystick inputs will generate desired velocities or positions rather than direct thruster speed commands. The control of desired states is done by a closed-loop positioning system with feedback. The methods for the proposed joystick control modes are described in this paper. Full scale experiments are presented demonstrating the performance of the joystick in closed-loop control.

Design of ROV Training Simulator

Semi-physical simulation technology and virtual reality technology in real-time three-dimensional dynamic simulation of remote operated vehicle, and a set of real ROV control system are utilized to design a ROV Training Simulator. This ROV Training Simulator can not only be used to train ROV operators, reduce the times of sea trial,but also can verify the function and performance of real ROV control system.

Italian underwater exploration in Antarctica: scientific diving and ROV operations

Italian underwater exploration in Antarctica: scientific diving and ROV operations