Sweden’s MMT selected Sonardyne’s acoustically aided inertial navigation system, SPRINT for its 2,000 metre rated remotely operated vehicle, Surveyor Interceptor.
Designed for subsea vehicles, Sonardyne believes, SPRINT makes optimal use of acoustic aiding data including USBL, LBL and Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) and other sensors such as pressure sensors to improve accuracy, precision, reliability and integrity in any water depth.
The accuracy of SPRINT complements the vehicle’s imaging and mapping sensors, resulting in improved survey data quality and substantially reduced ‘cost per kilometre’ of surveys.
On the Survey Interceptor, a Sonardyne Inverted Ultra-Short BaseLine (iUSBL) transceiver has been interfaced directly to the SPRINT resulting in a highly optimised navigation solution that delivered position updates up to 100 times a second.
Alan Macdonald , Sales Manager for Sonardyne, commented: “We are obviously delighted with the outstanding results that MMT has achieved using SPRINT, both in testing and more recently, during its first commercial operation. At a time when the offshore industry is focussed on ways to reduce costs without compromising on quality, the combination of MMT’s ground-breaking ROV and our SPRINT INS represents a unique offering to the construction survey marketplace.”
Jonas Andersson , R&D Manager at MMT, said: “When testing the new MMT Survey Interceptor ROV, we were looking for an inertial navigation solution that would deliver real-time performance with high speed updates. By running Sonardyne’s SPRINT inertial navigation system we witnessed a marked difference in the accuracy of all ROV positioning activities during the period, which in turn made a marked difference to the quality of the survey data received.”
“Now that Sonardyne has also released their new Syrinx DVL, we will be looking to run further tests in the future. This will be done with a view to achieving even more precise position accuracy using a tightly integrated Syrinx DVL, SPRINT and USBL acoustics,” Andersson concluded.