How aquatic AI robots could maintain offshore wind farms

The Manila Times

How aquatic AI robots could maintain offshore wind farms  An autonomous underwater robot, powered by AI, designed to adapt and react to rough seas in real-time, is being developed in the UK to help inspect and repair offshore wind farms. In the UK, over 2,600 wind turbines are located offshore, and there are plans to increase this capacity fourfold by the year 2030. Typically, each of these turbines requires maintenance checks up to three times annually, a rate that tends to increase as the turbines get older. Currently under trials in Edinburgh as part of the UK-government backed £1.4 million ($1.7 million) 'Underwater Intervention for Offshore Renewable Energies' (UNITE) project, the autonomous robots could enable high-precision operations even in turbulent sea conditions.  NATIONAL ROBOTARIUM / REUTERS / FRONTIER ROBOTICS  Subscribe to The Manila Times Channel - https://tmt.ph/YTSubscribe    Visit our website at https://www.manilatimes.net    Follow us:  Facebook - https://tmt.ph/facebook  Instagram - https://tmt.ph/instagram  Twitter - https://tmt.ph/twitter  DailyMotion - https://tmt.ph/dailymotion    Subscribe to our Digital Edition - https://tmt.ph/digital    Check out our Podcasts:  Spotify - https://tmt.ph/spotify  Apple Podcasts - https://tmt.ph/applepodcasts  Amazon Music - https://tmt.ph/amazonmusic  Deezer: https://tmt.ph/deezer  Tune In: https://tmt.ph/tunein   #TheManilaTimes #tmtnews #artificialintelligence #robots

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00:30I'm not from UK, he's not from UK.

00:45So nice, like looking forward or downwards.

00:48It's looking in front, forward, yeah.

00:50This is directly front.

00:51Yeah.

00:52Right, okay, yeah, I think I get it now, yeah.

00:53Okay, I think that's seabed, so that's probably the cliff here, yeah.

01:20We have a sonar here, and that robot is able to navigate autonomously around structure

01:50structures, and effectively build 3D models of the structure that can enable you to inspect

01:55them, to navigate around them, and to detect any defects in the structures.

02:09And the camera underwater is very dark, so you can't see much.

02:26So that's why we have a sonar.

02:39So our artificial intelligence is mainly a big autonomy engine that is analyzing the

02:47environment to see where should the robot go next to collect good data about the environment,

02:53and how to autonomously navigate between these different places, and also utilize the environment

02:58to its advantage.

02:59And that is by fusing all the sensor data from the robot together with the images from

03:04our camera system to ensure that it's operating in a safe and optimized way.

03:34We're like, how can you extract more information from the picture that is kind of hidden in

03:51the pixels that you can't see as a human, but when we go into like, properly analyzing

03:56it with our computer vision algorithms, we can extract information that we cannot see

04:00otherwise.

04:01So we can extend the visual length by quite a few times compared to what a human with

04:09goggles would do.

04:11In places in the UK, and especially in the North Sea, the visibility is usually very

04:16poor.

04:17So that's when it really matters for the safety of the robot and for the safety of the assets

04:21that we fuse much more sensor data together so that we can operate in a wide range of

04:27conditions.

04:28If you look at what's happening in the offshore sector, we're moving from oil and gas to renewable

04:32energy and in the near future, worldwide, we're going to have hundreds of thousands

04:36of wind turbines.

04:38And these turbines will need to be inspected and maintained offshore.

04:43At the moment, the technology we have involves big ship with a lot of big crew, and they're

04:48not carbon efficient, and they don't scale.

04:51So what we're developing here is a fully autonomous robotic solution, which will be remotely controlled

04:57from shore by a reduced crew with autonomous boats deploying autonomous vehicles like these

05:04ones that can do the job at scale.

05:07This project's looking at the elements of creating autonomy in the offshore sector where

05:12the environments are harsh, and we're trying to move people from those dangerous situations.

05:16And also there's not enough people to do the kind of inspections or the frequency of inspections

05:19that are needed.

05:20So that's kind of the big problem that we're trying to solve here.

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