Uncrewed Systems Technology 047 l Aergility ATLIS l AI focus l Clevon 1 UGV l Geospatial insight l Intergeo 2022 report l AUSA 2022 report I Infinity fuel cell l BeeX A.IKANBILIS l Propellers focus I Phoenix Wings Orca

96 In operation | BeeX A.IKANBILIS hull, sensors and thrusters, a technician presses the synchronise button on the GUI. That triggers the sending of ‘snapshots’ to the wind farm operator showing the most important areas observed during the inspection. “An inspection of one wind farm’s foundations might take around 30 minutes but still only find a few areas of potential concern,” Chia says. “As well as building our software and the hardware around it, we also came up with a clear idea of how to handle our data and report it to the customer.” The data processing software has therefore been optimised around quickly constructing these snapshot reports to enable a package of actionable information to be sent to the end-user, saving them the time and labour of poring through the 2D and 3D data for a large wind farm that could run into hundreds of hours’ worth. “The snapshot is an interactive 3D representation of the wind farm, which was uploaded to a cloud-based workspace with an integral workflow functionality that served to guide Northland Power through the things they were actually after,” Chia notes. “The cloud connection is achieved by a 4G antenna, which we connect to the vehicle via a cable after recovery.” From one to many In addition to potential future wind farm inspections, Schmoekel envisions further uses for the A.IKANBILIS’ adaptive autonomy. “I used to work in subsea ordnance clearances, which still rely on huge, heavy work-class ROVs,” he says. “From that background, it was important for me to see how stably the HAUV could behave around the monopile structure and within the water column, using all its sensors for simultaneous surveying and navigation – and as far as I’m concerned, that’s as much of a success as the data we got on our turbine,” he says. “The AUV has huge potential across maritime inspections, particularly as its engineers improve its autonomy for guidance and inspection precision with each dive. We therefore want to give them the chance to trial and progress their development further, and to offer them our wind farms to do that.” Northland Power, BeeX and Subsea Europe Services already intend to perform further trials with the A.IKANBILIS in 2023. The latter in particular hopes to begin honing the repeatability the vehicle can achieve across inspections of multiple wind turbines per dive, while Northland Power plans to work with BeeX to determine when it will be able to fully replace its ROVs with the HAUVs. “Wind farms can’t continue expanding at their rapid pace if they aren’t offered a way to curb the accelerating costs associated with inspecting larger and larger farms,” Chia says. “If we can show industry regulators that the A.IKANBILIS can survey a whole wind farm autonomously, robustly and at low cost, it will kickstart a new chapter in renewable wind energy investment.” December/January 2023 | Uncrewed Systems Technology A.IKANBILIS HAUV Dimensions: 90 x 80 x 40 cm Weight: 60 kg Onboard energy: 1 kWh Maximum endurance: 8 hours Hovering endurance: 2 hours Some key suppliers CPU: Intel GPU: Nvidia Sonar: Blueprint Subsea Acoustics comms: Sonardyne Gyrocompass: iXblue (now Exail) DVL: Teledyne RD Instruments Specifications In future, BeeX and Northland plan further trials with the A.IKANBILIS, including inspections of multiple wind farms per dive