Dr Nils Morozs

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Address:York, United Kingdom

Nils Morozs

Abstract:

Critical offshore infrastructure must be regularly monitored and maintained. The use of maritime autonomous systems (MAS) can significantly increase the scale, reduce the cost and improve the safety of subsea inspection and monitoring. The key enabling technology for MAS are autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). In particular, the deployment of fleets or “swarms” of AUVs is the next big step in enabling long-term, large-scale subsea monitoring and inspection. This will dramatically increase the quantity and quality of subsea data available to the operators on shore.

Reliable wireless communication is crucial for real-time control, localisation and navigation in AUV swarms. This is extremely challenging in the underwater environment, where conventional radio communication, including GPS, is not possible due to strong attenuation caused by the conductivity of seawater. The only practical communication method underwater is via acoustic waves. However, sound travels extremely slowly compared with electromagnetic waves. Therefore, networked underwater acoustic (UWA) communication is fundamentally challenging, and is still a capability gap in the subsea industry. In this talk I will give an overview of the challenges of reliable networked UWA communication, and possible solutions to this problem.

Address:United Kingdom