DeepOcean, Akvaplan-niva to test use of autonomous vehicles for offshore environmental studies
(WO) — Ocean services provider DeepOcean and Akvaplan-niva have signed an agreement to cooperate regarding the potential utilization of remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and unmanned glider vehicles (USVs) to perform environmental studies for offshore wind and oil and gas developments.
Akvaplan-niva is a subsidiary of the Norwegian Institute for Water Research (NIVA). The company provides advisory services, research and development, and analytical services for all water related topics.
“Both the offshore wind and offshore oil and gas industry could benefit from even more cost-efficient environmental assessment services. Combining sensor technology with unmanned and autonomous vessels could be one way of solving this. Compared to today’s solutions, this approach can substantially reduce use of fossil fuels and associated CO2 emissions,” Andries Ferla, ocean solutions and technology director at DeepOcean, said.
As part of the collaboration agreement, the two parties will work towards combining the field operations of DeepOcean’s autonomous vehicles – ROVs, USVs and autonomous inspection drones – with Akvaplan-niva’s environmental data collection services. The partnership also aims to utilise Akvaplan-niva’s unmanned autonomous glider vehicles commercially, for use in environmental studies.
Further, DeepOcean will share environmental data collected during the company’s ROV operations with Akvaplan-niva, for use by the wider research community.
By integrating environmental sensors with the vehicles, and streaming the data to a powerful cloud based processing system, the parties will investigate the opportunity to utilize ROVs, USVs, drones and gliders to perform ecosystem and environmental studies. The type of selected sensors allow harvesting physical, biogeochemical, chemical or biological data to get a high resolution understanding of the marine ecosystem structure and functioning in near real time.
“Today's advanced technology in robotics and digital solutions allow the convergence between the subsea operations and environmental services. The advantages for customers are multiple, it will reduce costs, CO2 emmission and personell risk, and it will increase data resolution drastically," Dr. Lionel Camus, manager digital solutions at Akvaplan-niva, said.
DeepOcean is a world-leading ocean services provider, enabling energy transition and sustainable use of ocean resources. The company delivers subsea services within oil and gas, removal and recycling of subsea infrastructure, offshore renewables, mining of marine minerals, and to other ocean-based industries.
Akvaplan-niva is headquartered in Tromsø, Norway. The company has 130 employees of which several hold Prof. II positions at Universities in Norway.
