PROPOSAL

Resident Drone Monitoring

Challenge: BLUE_sentinel

Pitch

Resident semi-autonomous underwater drones will provide continuous live access to the underwater environments, collecting data and streaming it to the onshore control room. The compact size, mobility and versatility are key differentiation factors of this solution.

Summary

Portable resident underwater drones can collect various data points across a defined area around the renewable installation and provide a 3D mapping of these to the operator. Continuous operation ensures that the monitoring provides significant insight into the impact of the installation to the nearby environment. Visual payload will allow for the operator to do simple inspection tasks of the assets underwater remotely, which will significantly improve asset management and reduce the need for the physical trips to the installation.

Idea

We are an underwater robotics team that focuses on miniaturizing the underwater technology to make it more affordable and therefore scalable across various underwater inspection and monitoring applications. We have a rare combination of skills that span across two most challenging areas of underwater technology - navigation and communication. Our commercial line of high-bandwidth optical modems allow for wireless transmission of up to 10Mbps of data, bringing high-speed WiFi below the water surface.

Impact

The dexterous portable underwater drones will reduce the reliance on the survey vessels to perform inspection and monitoring of remote assets and nearby underwater environment. This should help reduce the CO2 footprint from the polluting survey vessels. Not only can it collect data (that stationary sensors could also do), but it can collect tens of thousands of data points at different depth and across a perimeter of at least 2x2km around the structure, enabling 3D visualisation of the data cloud on a continuous basis (daily). Furthermore, having a mobile visual connectivity allows for visual inspections to be done as well.

About

Hydromea is a Swiss-based underwater robotics team with a strong AUV DNA from the academic projects dating back to 2003. We've developed a number of unique enabling underwater technologies that allow us to put a remote underwater platform today to perform regular inspections and monitoring of submerged assets. You can learn about us here:

https://www.hydromea.com/meet-hydromea-team/