UNderwater IntervenTion for offshore renewable Energies (UNITE)

这个繁荣的合作伙伴项目，UNITE，汇集了Fugro有限公司，一个主要的一级离岸服务提供商，以及来自赫瑞瓦特大学和帝国理工学院伦敦的世界领先的机器人研究团队，以解决海上可再生能源领域安全和强大的机器人解决方案的关键开放研究挑战。它特别关注感知，风险意识水下干预技术的开发和部署，这对于机器人解决方案在这个快速发展的行业中的广泛采用至关重要。UNITE项目的愿景是开发一种适用于海上风电场维护和维修的自主和半自主水下干预的整体解决方案，从海岸进行远程监控，并在全球范围内安全运行。UNITE的研究愿景和计划旨在减少使用船员支持船只进行操作，使海上涡轮机更高效，停机时间更短，维护和维修更及时，更具成本效益。这也将支持该行业降低成本和碳足迹，同时大幅改善健康和安全。在气候变化日益影响我们生活的世界，我们需要加快能源向净零过渡。英国海上风能潜力巨大，英国政府已将其作为优先事项，计划到2050年达到1TW。为了实现这样雄心勃勃的目标，你必须想象成千上万的海上风力涡轮机，部署在地球上一些最恶劣的环境中，并能够可靠地生产几十年的能源。目前，此类风电场的运营和维护成本占总成本的30%，并且使用部署在极端环境中的载人船舶进行，因此减少了可以部署的操作窗口，增加了运营的碳足迹和海上部署人员的风险。当越来越多的风力发电场建成时，这将无法扩展，当前解决方案的可用性，环境影响和成本将不再有意义。我们需要的是用更小、更环保、更具成本效益的机器人解决方案来取代这些大型资产，由新一代的飞行员、工程师和操作员从海岸安全地控制。这已经是一个现实，至少在先进的演示形式，当我们只感兴趣的检查。远程无人机、水面船只和水下系统可以被派去检查海底电缆、涡轮机和其他海底资产。在某些情况下，它们可以长期永久部署。但是，当需要进行更复杂的需要干预的任务（接触和操纵）时，目前的技术还没有准备好，特别是在机器人和海岸之间的通信链路是间歇性的、缓慢的或不可靠的情况下。如果不解决，这将极大地影响机器人技术的采用（因为现有的解决方案仍需要部署），并可能阻止其发展，从而减少海上可再生能源作为一种可行的清洁能源的进展。需要进行新的研究，以赋予远程机器人平台所需的干预能力，并确保平台即使在不受人类直接控制的情况下也是安全的。要做到这一点，机器人（及其传感器）必须能够构建周围世界的准确地图，并使用该地图绕过障碍物并朝向感兴趣的目标。它们需要能够安全地与结构相互作用（控制相互作用的力），并在受到潜在的重大外部干扰（电流，波浪等）的同时抓住物体，并协调各自的动作（例如，部署水下系统的水面车辆）。他们还需要了解何时可能出现故障，并提醒海岸上的操作员寻求支持。这就是联合起来的建议所要解决的问题。

This prosperity partnership project, UNITE, brings Fugro Ltd, a major Tier 1 offshore service provider, together with a world-leading robotics research team from Heriot-Watt University and Imperial College London to address key open research challenges for safe and robust robotic solutions in the offshore renewable sector. It specifically focuses on the development and deployment of perception-enabled, risk-aware underwater intervention techniques, which are critical for the widespread adoption of robotics solutions in this rapidly expanding sector. The vision of the UNITE project is to develop a holistic solution to autonomous and semi-autonomous underwater intervention applied to the maintenance and repair of offshore wind farms, remotely monitored from shore and safely operated worldwide. UNITE's research vision and programme aim at reducing the use of crewed support vessels for operation, keeping offshore turbines more productive with less downtime and more timely and cost-effective maintenance and repair. This will also support the industry to cut costs and carbon footprint while dramatically improving health&safety.In a world where climate change is increasingly impacting our lives, we need to accelerate the energy transition towards net-zero. The UK has a huge potential for Offshore Wind Energy and the UK government has made this a priority, planning to reach 1TW by 2050. To reach such ambitious targets, you have to imagine 10's of thousands of offshore wind turbines, deployed in some of the harshest environments on earth and able to reliably produce energy for decades. At present, the cost of operation and maintenance of such wind farms is 30% of the overall cost and is performed using manned vessels deployed in extreme environments, hence reducing the operational window they can be deployed, increasing the carbon footprint of operations and risk to the personnel deployed offshore. This will simply not scale when more and more wind farms are built and the availability, environmental impact and cost of the current solutions will no longer make sense. What is required is to replace these large assets by smaller, more environmentally friendly and cost effective robotic solutions, controlled safely from shore by a new generation of pilots, engineers and operators. This is already a reality, at least in advanced demonstrator form, when we are only interested in inspection. Remote drones, surface vessels and underwater systems can be sent to inspect subsea cables, turbines and other subsea assets. In some cases, they can be permanently deployed for long periods of time. However, when more complex tasks requiring intervention (contact and manipulation) are required, the current technology is not ready, especially in cases where the communication link between the robot and shore is intermittent, slow or unreliable. If not solved, this will dramatically impact the adoption of robotics (as existing solutions will still need to be deployed), and potentially stop it in its track, in turn reducing the progress of offshore renewable energy as a viable clean energy source. New research is needed to endow the remote robotic platforms with the intervention capabilities they require, as well as ensuring that the platforms are safe even when not in direct control of a human. For this to happen, robots (and their sensors) must be able to build an accurate map of the world around them and use this map to navigate around obstacles and towards targets of interest. They need to be able to interact with the structures safely (controlling force of interaction) and grasp objects whilst being subject to potentially significant external disturbances (currents, waves, etc) and coordinate their respective actions (e.g surface vehicle deploying an underwater system). They also need to understand when they might fail and alert an operator on shore to ask for support. This is what the UNITE proposal will tackle.