A consortium of five UK universities and over 30 industry partners is building a suite of autonomous robots—subsea, ground, and aerial—to inspect, repair, and maintain offshore oil and gas platforms and wind turbines without putting human workers in hazardous environments. The offshore energy industry faces a triple bind: low oil prices, expensive decommissioning of old North Sea infrastructure, and tight margins on renewable energy. At the same time, the workforce is ageing, and new graduates avoid dangerous offshore jobs. Operators need cheaper, safer ways to maintain topside and marine infrastructure. Robotics and AI are seen as the key to reducing staff offshore, cutting costs, and improving safety. If the ORCA Hub succeeds, offshore energy fields could be operated, inspected, and maintained entirely from shore. Robots would map and navigate around complex assets, deploy sensor networks for monitoring, and cooperate with remote human operators through intelligent interfaces that manage cognitive load in high-risk situations. The platform would support self-certification of both assets and robots. This would help keep the UK offshore energy sector—currently worth £40 billion and supporting 440,000 jobs—economically viable, while enabling UK startups and supply chains to export new products and services worth an additional £6 billion.
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The international offshore energy industry currently faces the triple challenges of an oil price expected to remain less than $50 a barrel, significant expensive decommissioning commitments of old infrastructure (especially North Sea) and small margins on the traded commodity price per KWh of offshore renewable energy. Further, the offshore workforce is ageing as new generations of suitable graduates prefer not to work in hazardous places offshore. Operators therefore seek more cost effective, safe methods and business models for inspection, repair and maintenance of their topside and marine offshore infrastructure. Robotics and artificial intelligence are seen as key enablers in this regard as fewer staff offshore reduces cost, increases safety and workplace appeal. The long-term industry vision is thus for a completely autonomous offshore energy field, operated, inspected and maintained from the shore. The time is now right to further develop, integrate and de-risk these into certifiable evaluation prototypes because there is a pressing need to keep UK offshore oil and renewable energy fields economic, and to develop more productive and agile products and services that UK startups, SMEs and the supply chain can export internationally. This will maintain a key economic sector currently worth £40 billion and 440,000 jobs to the UK economy, and a supply chain adding a further £6 billion in exports of goods and services. The ORCA Hub is an ambitious initiative that brings together internationally leading experts from 5 UK universities with over 30 industry partners (>£17.5M investment). Led by the Edinburgh Centre of Robotics (HWU/UoE), in collaboration with Imperial College, Oxford and Liverpool Universities, this multi-disciplinary consortium brings its unique expertise in: Subsea (HWU), Ground (UoE, Oxf) and Aerial robotics (ICL); as well as human-machine interaction (HWU, UoE), innovative sensors for Non Destructive Evaluation and low-cost sensor networks (ICL, UoE); and asset management and certification (HWU, UoE, LIV). The Hub will provide game-changing, remote solutions using robotics and AI that are readily integratable with existing and future assets and sensors, and that can operate and interact safely in autonomous or semi-autonomous modes in complex and cluttered environments. We will develop robotics solutions enabling accurate mapping of, navigation around and interaction with offshore assets that support the deployment of sensors networks for asset monitoring. Human-machine systems will be able to co-operate with remotely located human operators through an intelligent interface that manages the cognitive load of users in these complex, high-risk situations. Robots and sensors will be integrated into a broad asset integrity information and planning platform that supports self-certification of the assets and robots.
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