St. John’s, Newfoundland-based Kraken Robotics Inc. has announced that its wholly owned subsidiary, Kraken Robotic Systems Inc., is partnering with Avitas Systems, a GE Venture, to advance robotic inspections for the oil and gas, offshore renewable energy, and shipping industries.
Avitas Systems will integrate Kraken’s autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), acoustic and laser sensor technology, and artificial intelligence-based navigation software into its subsea inspection solutions. The partnership expands capabilities for inspections of, for example, offshore wind farm assets.
Kraken’s SeaVision sensor, which can attach to AUVs, combines laser scanning and optical imaging to provide detailed data. The sensor’s colorized laser imagery detects and characterizes corrosion, cracks, marine growth and other defects. SeaVision’s laser scanning process can be repeated thousands of times per second to generate coordinate values for millions of points on a surface. These points then become intricate 3D models of subsea infrastructure.
Avitas Systems will also use sonar technology and navigational software from Kraken to optimize robots’ abilities to follow supervisory commands, track pipeline or subsea field positioning with AI-powered swim paths, and identify priority areas for inspection. Kraken’s AquaPix synthetic aperture sonar (SAS) technology will specifically enable 3D volumetric imaging.
The high-resolution images of assets’ surface contours can be inputted into the Avitas Systems cloud-based platform, where advanced algorithms fuse multiple sensor data, perform image analytics and predict actionable outcomes in real time. The Avitas Systems platform can centralize and prioritize the inspection data by areas of interest to inspectors, which will increase efficiency, the companies explain.
Karl Kenny, Kraken’s president and CEO, says, “Integrating our technologies with Avitas Systems’ will significantly enhance subsea asset management and provide improved safety, reduced costs and actionable intelligence for operators. We look forward to announcing our first contract during Q4 2017.”
