Posters

Abstract

The harsh weather conditions to which offshore wind farms (OWFs) are exposed and the progressive increase of the distance from shore for upcoming installations require to gradually phase out human-based O&M (Operations and Maintenance) in favour of robotic technologies. Integrating Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) and Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) in the current inspection and maintenance procedures performed, as of today, mostly by human operators, might unlock a potential increase of the workability on site, by at the same time acting upon the mitigation of risks workers are exposed to. A comparison between conventional inspection procedures and more automated ones was implemented to outline all possible benefits that may be attributed to robotic technologies. The use case of this analysis is a real operating offshore wind farm, where UAVs, ROVs and ASVs are employed. Metocean data were collected from Copernicus to feed a statistical analysis whose primary objective was the computation of average site accessibility, number of available weather windows (during which it is possible for the crew to reach the wind farm safely) per season and waiting time due to bad weather conditions, considering different task durations and two sets of weather limitations. This work was developed within ATLANTIS H2020 project and the analysis conducted quantified what might be the benefits of integrating robots in O&M procedures for OWFs, namely in terms of increase of the number of available weather windows and reduction of the waiting time.