The Offshore Robotics for Certification of Assets (ORCA) WP4 workshop was held in Edinburgh. The workshop was an exciting opportunity to gauge and merge the academic and industrial view of ORCA. Under ORCA’s umbrella, diverse and broad expertise comes together: scientists, consultancy, oceaneering, robotics and oil companies collaborate to improve the automation of offshore systems.
The meeting focused on how autonomous systems can gather data to be fed into sophisticated models to forecast failure, monitor system health and remove humans from hazardous environments and tedious tasks. Over the course of the day, multiple presentations shed light on the state-of-the-art of autonomous devices and data analysis. Further on during the day stimulating discussions brought to the parties’ attention the key aspects and requirements to progress the Orca project. A higher level of automation is what the industry desires and where the science expertise engages. Some of the fundamental challenges are to power sub-sea devices, real-time transmission, communication speed and increase fault detection accuracy.
The ideal device would be able to memorise a set of regulations and standards, recognise an anomaly, process it and ultimately take a sensible decision about what to do next without any human interaction. However, this is yet to come!
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