| Abstract | The oil and gas industry seeks for offshore hydrocarbons in increasingly deeper water.
As near-shore reserves become depleted, oil and gas exploration activities have
extended beyond the continental shelf in several regions of the world, including the
Mediterranean Sea, West Africa, north-west Europe, Brazil and the Gulf of Mexico.
As exploration of deep waters yields discovery of producible reserves, oil is now
being produced from fields in 2,000 m water depth, and field development plans are
being created for production in depths exceeding 6,000 m.
The need to install, repair and maintain deep water facilities requires hydrographic
survey tools that can operate and function at these depths. Unfortunately, technology
has not been able to keep pace with exploration and production activities, and the
tools necessary to operate these deepwater fields is lacking. The magnitude of the
water depth between the ocean’s surface and the seabed significantly degrades the
resolution of data acquired by conventional tools and, therefore, new sensors are
being developed that can operate at the depths and temperatures close to the seabed.
However, these sensors, like all sensors operating remotely through water, require
long tethers for the transfer of data. These long umbilical result in deep water surveys
that are less productive than required and raise the costs exponentially with respect to
the increase in water depth. As a result of these difficulties in using conventional
hydrographic survey tools, the use of vessel-mounted and towed sensors has increased
in use.
During the 1990s, research and development activities have resulted in underwater
robotics through numerous efforts worldwide, especially in the area of remotely
operated vehicle (ROV) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV). The demand
for underwater robotic systems has increased due to not only the increase in
deepwater oil and gas operations, but the increasing concern of environmental issues,
along with military activities and scientific research. Approximately 50 new ROV and
AUV have been constructed during the 1990’s. Further R&D is occurring in
deepwater robotics as new materials and sensor technologies are developed along
with an increase on computing technology. However, this is just the beginning for
ROV and AUV technology, there are many rooms for development of ROV and AUV
especially practical and reliable ROV and AUV. Combining both ROV and AUV is
one of main future development. Free-swimming Remotely Operated Vehicle, hybrid
AUV-ROV, has developed in order to increase underwater application, performance
and efficiency of underwater robotics.
This paper summary some key areas in current state-of-the-art underwater robotic
technologies, and also the underwater robotics future directions. The author has not
tried to make this paper an exhaustive review of current deepwater robotics, rather it
provides an overview of the subject and provides references for further study. As
deepwater operations become an increasingly large part of several activities, the
development of deepwater ROV and AUV have an impact on several segments of the
global economy |