Abstract
Abstract
The Offshore market has seen a vast demand for new projects with increasing complexity in terms of involved technology and operational scenarios. All these applications share an important requirement: the need to guarantee the integrity and productivity of subsea critical energy infrastructure, to ensure the environmental and economic sustainability of projects. Due to the recent changes in the global geopolitical situation, asset monitoring and information availability is becoming vital to ensure the safe and efficient management of offshore energy projects, thus making the digital transformation of subsea assets a key objective. The above factors coupled with advancements in artificial intelligence and through-water communications are driving the rapid evolution of subsea monitoring technologies, that have now reached a sufficient maturity level for an industrial deployment at scale.
Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) and Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have been utilised for a long time to monitor underwater assets given their proven capability of periodically performing vessel-based inspection campaigns. Even if the frequency of missions by ROV and AUV can be very high, the data gathered by these robotic systems are discrete (not continuous); this represents a limitation whenever real time uninterrupted monitoring is required. An answer to these limitations can be provided by the use of stationary monitoring units that despite offering an interesting alternative also presents some significant challenges in their implementation, particularly when large areas need to be monitored and costly interconnection cables are required. In this scenario, a new technological solution that can provide a system of battery-powered underwater acquisition nodes, capable of communicating through-water, is emerging.
This novel advanced technological solution aims to unlock the implementation of a real underwater Internet-of-Things where the nodes will be able to gather and locally process data (edge computing), obtain short data packets and easily transmit them through water to inform about specific and potentially significant events. The nodes will be moreover capable of cooperating with each other and interchange data, thus allowing the realization of large and distributed monitoring matrixes; in addition, the nodes will also be able to interact with underwater vehicles to create complex monitoring systems where "stationary monitoring" nodes, placed in points of critical interest, are combined with the "itinerant inspections capabilities" of underwater drones.
The scope of this paper is to explore all the underwater sectors calling for underwater Internet-Of-Things solutions and present the potentials of these emerging technologies as enablers of new and disruptive monitoring paradigms.