UTEC Doubles AUV Fleet
UTEC Survey, USA, has doubled its AUV fleet to four vehicles in response to increasing demand for its AUV services. The company now operates a fleet of identically equipped 1,000m rated AUV systems. The fleet offers enhanced subsea positioning, robust operational performance, and low logistics designed for dual-mode operations utilising clients' vessels of opportunity.
The AUVs are comprised of separate modules enabling operators to change configuration by adding or removing sensor modules, subject to the requirements of each mission. Typical missions have included pre-route survey, structure and pipeline inspection, scour monitoring and shallow environmental investigation. The ability to rapidly reconfigure the AUVs means for example that a mission undertaking seafloor bathymetry can be reconfigured on deck to undertake the next mission with a suite of environmental sensors for locating hydrocarbon seeps or pipeline leak detection. The AUV’s endurance with a full sensor suite is approximately six hours, while its low logistics and small backdeck footprint allows for multiple AUVs being deployed at one time providing data acquisition on a 24 hour basis.
Developments and enhancements to standard off-the-shelf-systems include: a sub-bottom profiler module; enhanced surface DGPS acquisition; subsea acoustic positioning; a magnetometer; a seep/leak detection module and photogrammetry capability for subsea structure/pipeline inspection.
