Issue 45 | Uncrewed Systems Technology Aug/Sept 2022 Tidewie USV Tupan | Performance monitoring | Bayonet 350 | UAVs insight | Xponential 2022 | ULPower UL350i and UL350iHPS | Elroy Air Chaparral | Gimbals | Clogworks Dark Matter

25 I n Brazil, offshore energy is big business. The country is the world’s eighth-largest oil producer, most of which comes from basins off the southeast coast, and its output is expected to rise, with some new oil and gas fields now coming on stream. Brazil is no stranger to clean energy though: nearly half of its total energy supply and 83% of its electricity comes from renewable sources. Of the latter, 80% of it comes from hydroelectric dams. However, because Brazil’s low-rain season coincides with its high-wind season, wind farms are also in huge demand to complement its hydroelectric sources. Wind turbine construction is therefore accelerating across Brazil’s maritime regions, with a mathematically exponential rise in installed plants, from just 27 MW in 2005 to more than 21,000 MW in 2021. The country’s energy security and much of its economy therefore relies increasingly on an immense number of wind farms, hydroelectric dams, oil rigs and other infrastructure continuing to operate without failures. Inspections and other maintenance duties across such infrastructure are typically performed using highly dangerous and costly approaches, such as suspending workers from helicopters to take thermal images of sections of concern or manually perform repairs. This, and the consequent expansion of harbours and other coastal and riverine structures, has generated an enormous demand for uncrewed and potentially autonomous inspection solutions to remove the risk of human casualties and the costs of crewed vehicles. Enter TideWise, based in Rio de Janeiro and formed by marine autonomy experts Rafael Coelho (its CEO) and Sylvain Joyeux (CTO) after the two met in 2018 while working on a project together. At the time, Coelho was head of design at ASV Global (now part of L3Harris) where he had worked for 7 years on USVs such as the C-Cat 3 (featured in issue 18, February/March 2018), while Joyeux was technical director at 13 Robotics, now Kraken Robotics Brazil. “We both foresaw the huge market for ‘floating inspection robots’ to service Brazil’s energy industry, and our technical skills were highly complementary,” Joyeux recounts. “The planned TideWise USV Tupan | Dossier Uncrewed Systems Technology | August/September 2022