“If we are talking about a transition from a conventional vessel to a USV, what we find is that once a higher complexity of tasks presents, human intervention and/or a typical survey vessel are, for the time being, still required. However, while USVs currently do not have the capacity to do all the types of tasks that a conventional vessel might – such as cable route preparation– Sulmara is concentrating primarily on conducting survey operations from a USV platform, mainly geophysical surveys,” Andy Doggett , Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Sulmara, said in an interview with offshoreWIND.biz.
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The company currently has USVs deployed in Taiwan, where it plans to have a more advanced platform by the end of the year.
Sulmara also has upcoming projects in Europe and is currently operating in the U.S. as well. According to Doggett, the company is growing its fleet both in terms of the numbers, geographical location, and in terms of advanced capability of the USV – and is also working on an AUV.
For Sulmara too, lowering the carbon footprint and allowing for easy and fast collection and delivery of data are on the top of the list for adding robotic, and cloud, capabilities to its offering.
Here, Andy Doggett highlighted that the quality of data was paramount and that the company, which is also using cloud processing, was focused on ensuring the processing was sophisticated enough to deliver the highest quality data.
“From a real-time data delivery point of view, we are also developing a portal which will allow real-time access to vessel activities of both crewed and uncrewed vessels. Through the portal, a user – either Sulmara personnel or the client’s team – will be able to see the live progress of a vessel, including some of the data. They can also see the metocean data, the weather, survey progress in percentage, etc.,” Sulmara’s Andy Doggett said.
Speaking about the use of AI at Sulmara, Doggett said that the company was also employing AI where the technology can assist while keeping the quality of data in check.
“Using AI falls within our ambition to reduce the time from the data acquisition to delivery. First, we make sure we have got the best quality data offshore and then we upload it to the cloud – and once data is there, we use AI to reduce processing time,” Andy Doggett said.
“We are employing AI for target identification in particular because we need to get certain information into our clients’ hands as fast as possible. If we are doing a UXO survey at an offshore wind farm and there are many targets, one of the most time-consuming activities is verifying those targets and using an AI model can do, at least the preliminary work, much quicker.”