The nuclear power industry has had to develop techniques for operations in hazardous areas. With the decline of nuclear power in most countries, the technology is increasingly finding its way into other industries.
Robots are typically used for intervention at nuclear plants, and similar robotics techniques are increasingly being applied in offshore oil and gas installations.
Remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) are an established application of robotics in the offshore industry, reducing the need for risky diving operations and enabling field developments in waters too deep for divers.
U.K. Robotics Ltd., Manchester, originally developed the Advanced Teleoperations Controller (ATC) for the nuclear industry to direct operations of manipulator arms.
The company is beginning to sell this product for use on ROVs but is also developing other systems that may be useful to the increasingly safety driven offshore sector.
ATC consists of an industrial personal computer, controlling any one of a large variety of manipulator arms or other tools via a control panel with joysticks, a squeeze-grip handle, or a master/slave manipulator.
New sensors
Martin Bucknell, commercial director of U.K. Robotics, said the company is split into two groups-one working on applications of ATC and other products, the other providing research and development.
Bucknell said the company is also working to prove new manipulator arm sensors for underwater operations, which will enable ROVs to avoid collision when operating in confined spaces such as within deepwater subsea manifolds.
Infrared and capacitive sensors will be able to tell when an ROV is approaching a piece of seabed equipment, which subsea cameras are unable to show clearly.
In a "simple" application, the sensors could be used to stop the ROV and alert the operator that another way around the obstacle must be found. In a more complex system, information from the sensors could be used by a control computer to help work out a new route for the ROV arm automatically.
Scanner
Another U.K. Robotics development is Architect, which uses a portable laser scanner to survey an installation's dimensions. These data are fed into Architect, which creates a 3D computer-aided design model of the installation.
"With Architect we can look at a built installation," said Bucknell, "that will quite likely have been modified many times over the years and create an up-to-date 3D model and drawings."
Bucknell said applications could include offshore decommissioning and safety case compilation to meet U.K. offshore regulations. In both cases, accurate details of an installation's current configuration are needed.
"The target market for Architect is any industrial plant whose shape can be broken down into a number of plane and cylindrical parts," said Bucknell.
"For oil and gas platforms, this type of image compilation is currently being done by photogrammetry, but this is a comparatively slow and complex process compared with our laser mapping system."
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