The Underwater Intervention for Offshore Renewable Energies (UNITE) project is led by researchers from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and Imperial College London in the National Robotarium on Heriot-Watt’s campus. 

The Robotarium is supported by £21m from the UK Government, bolstered with a further £1.4m investment from the Scottish Government, as part of the £2.3 billion for regional ‘levelling up’ projects in aim to foster world-leading research and support high quality jobs, investment and growth. 

Together, with Fugro, the UNTIE project looks to develop remotely operated and semi-autonomous technology to address unique sector challenges. The outcomes will lead to increased worker safety, less carbon emissions, better turbine productivity, and cost saving when doing repairs.  

The UK is home to over 11,000 offshore wind assets in the UK, with thousands of more projects under development. The UK’s megawatt output from offshore wind farming is surpassed only by China, according to Statistica. 

Each wind turbine requires up to three check-ups per year, which involve thousands of crewed missions annually. UNTIE’s vessels will be capable of subsea inspection, maintenance and repair and the robotic systems can be operated anywhere in the world.

“The long-term ambition is for crewless boats to be able to do this autonomously without direct human control based on a predetermined maintenance cycle,” said Prof. Yvan Petillot, academic co-lead at the National Robotarium and principal investigator of the UNITE project.

“UNITE has enormous potential to power the UK’s offshore renewable sector and beyond, delivering worldwide economic and environmental impact that can benefit communities around the world,” he said.

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According to the research team, a key area of research during this project will be enabling robots to create subsea terrain maps, and explore how robots can autonomously interact with underwater structures during changing currents or rough seas. 

Mark Bruce, Global Product manager at Furgo said: “As the expansion and influence of marine robotics stretches ever further across the marine industry, we are committed to leading the industry’s remote and autonomous revolution. Key to this is overcoming the challenges of remote operations by increasing our awareness and autonomy level in the sub-sea environment. “