ATLANTIS
New frontiers for inspection and monitoring of offshore energy applications
| Business | Period | Project Coordinator | Funding Scheme |
|---|---|---|---|
| Energy | January 2020 - June 2023 | INESC TEC | H2020-ICT-2019-2 |
Challenge
Nowadays the costs for inspection, maintenance and repair activities (IMR) of offshore wind farms still constitute a significant part of the total costs of offshore wind power. In particular, with the current technologies these costs can account for up to 30 % of the total cost of energy for offshore wind power.
ATLANTIS Project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement No 871571 in order to deploy a pioneer maritime pilot infrastructure for the demonstration of key enabling robotic technologies to support the IMR activities that are required to manage and operate offshore wind farms.
The innovative focus within the project is on deploying the ATLANTIS Test Center, a pilot site to be installed in the Portuguese coast to facilitate the roll-out of robotic-based technology to users through a market pull strategy. The ATLANTIS Test Center will include relevant stakeholders from robotics sector, offshore wind energy market and maritime industry.
The novelty of the ATLANTIS Test Center is the possibility to demonstrate complex offshore operations based a resource orchestration of heterogeneous robots in a multi-domain environment that can be autonomously or remotely operated, by e.g.: survey of the floating structure (underwater and surface); survey of the mooring systems (underwater); survey of the biological growth (underwater and surface); survey of the umbilical and support cables (underwater and surface); survey of the cable until the touchdown points (underwater) and, cleaning the floating structure (underwater and surface).
After the close-to-shore testing phase, the robotic assets that have reached readiness for demonstrating will be given the opportunity of testing and collecting performance data in a real world environment. This second testing phase will be conducted within the WindFloat Atlantic site which will serve as test basis.
Approach
In the framework of ATLANTIS, RINA will support ATLANTIS consortium in the development of close to market inspection and O&M methodologies and guidelines, also supporting a specific regulatory and standardization assessment and by performing a preindustrial risk assessment of ATLANTIS offshore structure.
Moreover, we are involved in the development of ATLANTIS long-term Strategy, Technology Industrialization and Business Case, which means assessing how the solutions developed through ATLANTIS will impact in the European offshore wind industry and, more specifically, on the O&M strategies and costs, also promoting the engagement of stakeholders at different levels.
Finally, we are also responsible for the social, economic and environmental impact analysis in order to identify the future opportunities and barriers to ATLANTIS technology and the IPR Management.
Conclusion
In conclusion, ATLANTIS will play an important role in connecting the market needs and user’s expectation to robotic applications from the research, technology developers and system integrators, by accelerating the roll-out of maritime robotic technology to end-users through real-world demonstrations open to all communities.
