Connectivity poses one of the biggest challenge for subsea operations.
Recent advances have made it possible to control #subsea vehicles from onshore but despite the potential benefits on cost, carbon footprint and safety, it’s still far from the norm. In the COVID era where office workers have adapted to work wherever we are based, what do you see as the biggest barriers to wider adoption of onshore operations?
Is it commercial and operating models? Culture? The maintenance and reliability of the vehicles themselves? HonuWorx believes one of the biggest challenges remains connectivity.
Not just connectivity between onshore and offshore, but between robots and humans.
We accept that the remote vehicles must become smarter to deal with the challenges of intermittent or laggy communications. Degrees of autonomy are required to ensure vehicles behave in an expected manner in the absence of real-time commands – but how do we develop trust in those behaviours? How can we leverage human skills to verify a system’s capabilities while keeping them out of harm’s way?
Honuworx is working to improve this connectivity with a concept we’ve termed Distributed Control Centre (DCC). DCC is a flexible distributed control tower concept that fuses marine communications and the cloud to allow pilots, robots, software, support teams and observers to be geographically distributed and rapidly connected to an operation.
What are the challenges you think are important for remote subsea operations? Share your thoughts in the comments!