Unmanned Systems Technology 038 l Skyeton Raybird-3 l Data storage l Sea-Kit X-Class USV l USVs insight l Spectronik PEM fuel cells l Blue White Robotics UVIO l Antennas l AUVSI Xponential Virtual 2021 report

54 installed on the USV, and start recharging and uploading data to the USV. The landing platform, manufactured by Stable, is stabilised using two gimbals to reduce the need for motion compensation by the UAV during landing. If the UAV has detected an oil spill after docking, upon receiving the UAV’s data containing the spill’s GNSS coordinates the USV will navigate to where the oil should be, and collect a sample using an integrated tool, to distinguish in real time whether there really is oil or if the thermal camera has produced a false positive. “We are currently working with wind farm operators to define the concept of operations for them, listing requirements for the kinds of inspections we could do with both vehicles,” Coelho notes. “The USV for example can carry Lidars and multi-beams, which may be too heavy for the UAV but could reveal critical information about the condition of the pylons, moorings or the seabed if the water isn’t too deep for the Lidar to give accurate readings. We are also working on integrating an inspection-class ROV on the USV. “The UAV will use EO/IR or smaller Lidars to check the blades and hubs, intermittently landing to recharge from the USV’s much larger energy storage. By uploading its data to the USV – which can carry much heavier and more power-hungry comms – the UAV can transmit the surveyed information to the wind farm owner in real time, so if a particularly serious anomaly has been spotted they can direct the USV and UAV to go back and look more closely at the damage to figure out the type, extent and urgency of repairs needed.” Meanwhile, iXblue’s DriX platform (profiled in UST 25, April/May 2019) is continuing its work with customers for offshore wind farms and oil & gas operations as well as nautical charting projects, in addition to having recently been tested by the French Navy and selected for work by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. From these experiences, the DriX’s engineers have updated it in numerous ways over the past two years. Many of these have been aimed at easing remote access and maintenance across its electronics, power systems and other hardware management, in addition to improvements in overall system reliability. “A key part of that was upgrading the human-machine interface [HMI] with new features to enable advanced June/July 2021 | Unmanned Systems Technology The DriX from iXblue has been updated in several ways to enable much faster and easier maintenance, including remote inspections and diagnostics (Courtesy of iXblue) Brazilian company Tidewise is developing a combined USV-UAV solution for inspecting offshore wind farms, as well as for detecting small oil spills (Courtesy of Tidewise)