Marine Technology Reporter Blogs - auv

http://digitalmagazines.marinelink.com/nwm/MarineTechnology/201703/ The March 2017 edition of Marine Technology Reporter is available, and I'm really pleased to present the work of Ben Kinnaman and his Greensea Systems team. Ben is an excellent interview, and his team's work toward better connecting man and machine is enlightening.

The VENUS observatory in the Salish Sea is represented by a series of installations in Saanich Inlet and Strait of Georgia. The Victoria Experimental Network Under the Sea (VENUS) has been in continual operation since February, 2006 and is operated by Ocean Networks Canada at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada. The cabled instrument arrays are deployed in the coastal waters of southern British Columbia, and the facility provides long-term oceanographic data on physical, chemical, biological, and sediment conditions in Saanich Inlet and in the Strait of Georgia near Vancouver, British Columbia. The data, including images and audio, are processed and made available to researchers and the public through the VENUS website.

Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) perform a wide range of tasks in a variety of underwater scenarios ranging from research to offshore oil industry support, military operations and S&R. Technological developments, have greatly enhanced their scope of operation including harsh environment operations, such as deepwater and Arctic ops. As oil operations went to deeper waters, so did ROVs, which became a key asset in subsea operations such as pre-salt development and has also been increasingly substituting divers below 300 meters, although saturation diving is very much alive and will also continue to be an important asset. The ROVs of the future will have increased intelligent autonomous behavior and will use logic driven circuitry for routine tasks like turning valves…

Also known as the Socorro Islands, they are located 386km (250 miles) southwest of the tip of Baja California (Cabo San Lucas) and over 720km (446 miles) west of Manzanillo, the Revillagigedos are one of three Mexican island groups in the Pacific Ocean. All four islands that make up the Revillagigedos Archipelago are remote, volcanic in origin and offer some of the most unpredictable, wild drift diving in the world. Isla Socorro is the largest of the Revillagigedos islands. Dive operator live aboard Solmar V, one of two live-aboards that go there has been using u/w sensors attached to buoy cables to record the movement of hundreds of…

Portuguese explorers were the first to arrive at the Abrolhos National Marine Park., having named the islands and sailed along the Caravelas Rivers since 1503. The name Abrolhos is short for open your eyes in Portuguese, and is an indication of the dangers to navigation in the area, which has numerous reef and rock formations just shy of the surface of the sea or even awash, and is dotted with shipwrecks. In 1987, a small remnant humpback whale population was discovered during the Marine Park’s implementation and thus Abrolhos was suggested as the species’ main “nursery” ground on the Western South Atlantic. The Humpback Whale Project was then created to promote research and protection for these mammals in Brazil.

Portuguese explorers were the first to arrive at the Abrolhos National Marine Park., having named the islands and sailed along the Caravelas Rivers since 1503. The name Abrolhos is short for open your eyes in Portuguese, and is an indication of the dangers to navigation in the area, which has numerous reef and rock formations just shy of the surface of the sea or even awash, and is dotted with shipwrecks. In 1987, a small remnant humpback whale population was discovered during the Marine Park’s implementation and thus Abrolhos was suggested as the species’ main “nursery” ground on the Western South Atlantic. The Humpback Whale Project was then created to promote research and protection for these mammals in Brazil.

The fisheries industry in Rio de Janeiro particularly and in Brazil in general, has historically received few investments from the government or the private sector. In reality, even fisheries monitoring, regulations and inspections are lax, at best. Many species have become basically extinct, such as the large lobster. This many soon begin to change. Recently the environmental secretary for Rio de Janeiro, Carlos Minc, announced that investments in fisheries and aquaculture will be included as part of the demands for local environmental licensing. This will be mostly directed to industrial environmental licensing in the north part of Rio but will eventually be an integral demand in all environmental licensing procedures along the coast of Rio.

With a range up to 1000 km, a maximum operating depth of 6000 m, and a payload capacity of 0.5 m3, Autosub6000 is one of the world’s most capable ultra-deep water AUVs. The Autosub6000 was developed by the Underwater Systems Laboratory at the National Oceanography Center in Southampton, with funding from the UK Natural Environment Research Council. Autosub6000 is the latest 6000 m rated version of the Autosub AUV series, which has been used extensively for ocean science during the last 10 years, including work under ice operations in the Arctic and Antarctic. The design of the nose and tail sections, including the navigation and control systems, are substantially inherited from the tried and tested Autosub3.

The GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel is one of the world’s leading institutes in the field of marine sciences. The institute investigates the chemical, physical, biological and geological processes of the seafloor, oceans and ocean margins and their interactions with the atmosphere. With this broad spectrum GEOMAR is unique in Germany. Additionally, the institute has successfully bridged the gap between basic and applied science in a number of research areas. The institute specializes in the interdisciplinary investigation of marine sciences, from sea floor geology to marine meteorology, with research efforts being conducted worldwide in all oceans and seas.

Bluefin Robotics’ Bluefin-21 is a highly modular AUV able to carry multiple sensors and comprehensive payloads, while at the same time boasting a high-energy capacity that enables extended operations even at the greatest depths. The Bluefin-21 was designed to operate from various ships of opportunity worldwide and has a software package that is flexible, robust, customizable and user-friendly, while also having advanced autonomy and behaviors. Bluefin’s next generation behavior control system provides a highly flexible system for accomplishing the goals specified in a mission plan. This behavior control facilitates dynamic insertion, removal, and modification of mission elements during execution. This is a vital capability in the often uncertain and noisy environments that AUVs face.

As government agencies, research institutions, academia, and a range of industries look for new light-weight and low-cost solutions for subsea survey and inspection tasks, it becomes clear that new companies are entering the market with the goal of providing these specific services. At the same time the industry that manufactures the tools for these tasks, such as ROV’s, AUV’s and sensors and visualization software are also bringing in compact and affordable, yet powerful, products. Using the latest technology applied to inshore and offshore areas, these companies may soon be competing with established brands and in some case they offer services that few companies in the world can offer, creating their own niche.

Offshore Ocean Observatories, are composed of suites of surface and subsea instruments and sensors with long-term power supplies and permanent communications links that can feed data to scientific laboratories in real-time. Motivated by advances in computing, telecom, marine architecture and subsea sensor technology, researchers observe the oceans in real-time, for long periods of time, and sky around all the way to deepwater, including imaging and continuous sensor observation along the whole water column to the sea floor. Ocean observatories are designed to answer questions about how the seas and oceans work, their dynamics and peculiarities.

Accessing to the world’s deepest ocean trenches has always been challenging and these have only been reached sporadically, leaving these areas virtually unexplored. The Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute’s (WHOI) Nereus, a proof of concept Hybrid Remotely Operated Vehicle (HROV), now being used on Schmidt Ocean Institute’s (SOI) Falkor and other research vessels, offers unprecedented access to the deepest regions for scientists, enabling systematic exploration and studies of deep trenches. There are a number of deepsea trenches at hadal depths around the globe worth exploring, highlighting to WHOI and SOI that they would have an exceedingly large area to cover with a single HROV.

The Technical Program at the OTC Brasil 2013 was definitely one of the event’s major attractions. There we’re dozens of presentations and panels during each of the 3 days, and it was definitely hard to pick which to attend. I personally went to about 12 of these and not one disappointed me. I have to start somewhere, so I actually chose a presentation from the last day to begin this series. At this point I believe that just about everyone knows what an AUV is, but in case you don’t, it is the acronym for Autonomous Underwater Vehicle. These come in all sorts of shapes and sizes, having various capabilities and possible uses. I must admit that I was impressed with the Lockheed Martin Marlin® AUV. At first glance it resembles what you’d expect from any top of the line AUV.

The SeaBED AUV, developed by WHOI scientist Hanumant Singh and colleagues, is an AUV that can fly slowly or hover over the seafloor to depths of 6,000 feet (2,000 meters), making it particularly suited to collect highly detailed sonar and optical images of the seafloor. SeaBED flies about 8 feet (2.5 meters) above the seafloor, flashing its strobe light and snapping a photo every three seconds. It maintains a constant altitude and speed of a ½ knot. Over the last seven years SeaBED-class AUVs have shown their versatility on missions ranging from shallow coral reef surveys to searches for deep-sea hydrothermal vents, in environments ranging from the open ocean to the dense ice cover of the Arctic.

The R/V Meteor research ship arrived in Fortaleza, Ceara, on Brazil’s Equatorial Margin last Friday, June 28th. The Meteor which has a complement of 30 scientists of different nationalities, including one Brazilian, left port on Monday as it begins another Atlantic crossing to Namibia in West Africa, where it is due to arrive on July 29th. Along the voyage the ship will be collecting samples and data from deep waters, to be analyzed by a multidisciplinary team of researchers, composed of chemists, biologists and physicists. The only Brazilian aboard is Marcio Pereira, a 63 year old professor of Oceanographic Physics from the Geophysics department of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), whose studies will be concentrated in variations of marine currents.

Marine Magnetics Corp from Markham, Ontario has successfully tested an AUV-towed Magnetometer. According to Doug Hrvoic president and owner of Marine Magnetics Corp, a company specialized in researching, developing and manufacturing marine magnetometers, OceanServer’s Iver2 AUV model was chosen for its design. “The Iver2 was designed to enable the integration of various sensors by a third party, and without direct involvement of the Iver developers,” says Bob Anderson, president of OceanServer Technology. “From a hardware standpoint, one approach has been to tow a sensor in the water column behind the AUV, and to connect a tow cable/electrical interface cable to a rugged…

Researchers from Coppe/UFRJ (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) will use data from AUVs,UUVs, floating sensors and satellites in a novel monitoring system, which scientists believe will decrease the time needed in order to identify oil spills. Other than the important aspect of quickly identifying oil spills in the pre-salt, scientists will gain greater knowledge about this little explored region, which is already considered to be the new frontier in the Brazilian O&G industry. The project is named “Projeto Azul” or Blue Project and calls for a US$10 million investment, which will be footed by BG Brasil. The Project was launched and the investment agreement signed last week during the RIO + 20 event.

The “Restinga de Jurubatiba” National Park has a coastal area 44 km long and is composed of shrub like trees, rich fauna and flora, 18 pristine coastal lagoons that occasionally open up to the sea. However up to now, its 15 hectares did not encompass the sea fronting it. That is precisely where the most endangered group of dolphins in Brazil are found in greater abundance. The Pontoporia blainvillei, commonly known as “Toninha” in these parts, is set to be awarded its first dedicated preservation area in the State of Rio de Janeiro. The idea is to include an area with a depth of up to 30 meters (following the depth curve), along the 44 km coastal area that comprises the National Park. This will add up to a 15 km increase in the protected area.

With companies such as Kongsberg and ECA bringing state of the art AUV models into the Brazilian market, and with the great demand for AUV services from the O&G industry, government agencies and universities, the future of AUVs in Brazil looks really promising. Presently, most AUVs are being employed by the O&G industry for pipeline routing and monitoring, seabed mapping and other specialized services. However there is a growing demand from academia to employ AUVs is oceanographic research and environmental research, this is an important development because it will allow universities to have unprecedented leverage to undertake complex research programs from shallow water to the deepest ocean basins off Brazil and off all the eastern South American coastline…