Smart-ROV

Modern remotely operated vehicles (ROV) are tele-controlled in much the same way as they were when introduced for subsea operations 40 years ago. This project will apply recent advances in robotics to make ROV operations more efficient and less prone to human errors.

There are currently several people involved in a ROV operation. The project will therefore start with an extensive human factor evaluation to determine how these operations are carried out in real life and how they are both facilitated and obstructed by technology.

Then, based on human factors and robotics, ROV operations can be improved by increasing the level of automation, provide technological augmentation, and better situational awareness. The development will reduce the cognitive workload of the operations and the associated operational risk of human errors. The ROV will be cybernetically defined in space inside the operational envelope, giving the system explicit knowledge of it spatial location with regards to other objects of interest (e.g. a subsea well template or subsea Christmas tree).

The project will have access to a resident ROV that is deployed for a major Norwegian operator company. That will be a unique and world-first way to validate the robotics development by field experiments, and is expected to be an especially fruitful approach for scientific publications that significantly extends the current technological frontier.