Researchers at the University of Limerick (UL) have developed a remote-operated vehicle for inspecting floating offshore wind farms, achieving successful tests at Ocean Wind's WindFloat Atlantic floater. This advancement, led by UL's Centre for Robotics and Intelligent Systems (CRIS), aims to address the maintenance challenges associated with these structures.
The CRIS team employed a fleet of field robots, subsea remotely operated vehicles, and unmanned aerial vehicles to survey the WindFloat Atlantic, located off the coast of Portugal. This effort resulted in high-resolution, geo-referenced 3D models of both above and below water structures. The findings will be available through open-access articles, providing benefits to the public, academia, and government.
UL CRIS co-director Daniel Toal emphasized the importance of this research in relation to Ireland's offshore wind strategy, which aims to achieve 37GW of renewable energy capacity by 2050. Toal highlighted the necessity for developing intervention, repair, and maintenance capacities to ensure efficient and cost-effective offshore operations.
The testing formed part of the ATLANTIS project, which seeks marine technology solutions for inspecting offshore wind structures, funded by the Sustainable Energy Authority of Ireland Robots for Wind Farm project. Ocean Winds, as the majority owner, developer, and operator of the WindFloat Atlantic, played a crucial role as a testing partner. Support was also provided by MaREI, a Science Federation Ireland Centre for Energy Climate, Marine Research and Innovation.
One significant challenge in inspecting floating turbines is the movement of the structure. The UL team addressed this issue by utilizing an adaptive control system for the remote-operated vehicle and customized machine vision algorithms for image post-processing.
