Case Study
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Environmental impact assessments are crucial for offshore wind farms to identify, assess and mitigate potential environmental impacts, ensuring responsible development that balances renewable energy goals with marine ecosystem protection. Collecting environmental data to inform these assessments is often difficult because of the complexity of conditions on the seafloor. With the support of an AEA Seed grant, researchers from the University of Sydney have developed a sovereign Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) than can hover above the seafloor and collect this data.
Lead researcher Dr Lachlan Toohey says the prototype AUV has many potential applications but is particularly well suited for offshore infrastructure assessments.
Two of their seeker AUVs were recently deployed to survey seafloor sites near the Gippsland Offshore Wind Area in Victoria.
‘This was done with our industry partner Fathom Pacific, which provides environmental assessments to the offshore wind industry,’ Dr Toohey said.
‘We’ve also operated in Tonga as part of a larger scientific effort, showing the capability of the AUVs to operate in more complex reef environments on the slopes of the volcanic islands,’ he said.
Dr Toohey said these AUVs are helping to transform our understanding of coastal regions of our oceans and seas, making it simpler to capture high quality seafloor imagery over larger regions.
‘The AUVs improve image quality beyond existing techniques like towed video, drop cameras and remotely operated vehicle deployments, and increases the scale of the area that can be covered,’ he said.
‘This technology can help the offshore wind, oil and gas industries better understand the environmental effects of their activities and inspect infrastructure more effectively. Ultimately, this results in a cleaner environment for all.’
Dr Toohey said the AEA Seed grant was instrumental in testing and developing the AUV technology.
‘The funding has enabled us to take the robots from a research environment and start building experience in commercial delivery and demonstrations to a wider industry.’
Dr Toohey said interacting with industry through their project has been beneficial, introducing the research team to elements of business operation that are not typically encountered in a university engineering environment, such as insurance, finance and marketing.
Director of Fathom Pacific Adrian Flynn said partnering with university researchers had been mutually beneficial to their company.
‘Extending from our collaboration on past projects in Port Phillip Bay and Gippsland Lakes, these new generation AUVs further advance the quality and operational efficiency of seafloor studies,’ he said.
Dr Toohey said feedback from their industry partners is helping to guide the development of the AUVs.
‘Our increased focus on monitoring systems for the AUVs comes from this feedback, and we use their expertise in offshore deployments to improve our methods and designs for monitoring buoys and launch and recovery systems for the AUVs,’ he said.
The researchers are focussed on expanding the fleet of AUVs to enable more simultaneous deployments to maximise their use of ship time and building the support equipment to further reduce the need for close monitoring from manned vessels.
‘We’re working to manufacture our battery systems which are being used in the AUVs and other support equipment at beyond prototype scale with a local manufacturing outfit,’ Dr Toohey said.
This project is another great example of how AEA is supporting university researchers to translate their projects into commercial opportunities with real-world impacts.