Oceaneering Adds Sonardyne Navigation to Its Vehicles

Oceaneering International has ordered hybrid navigation systems from Sonardyne for its subsea resident vehicles Freedom and E-ROV. 

The two resident vehicle systems are to be fitted with Sonardyne’s SPRINT-Nav an all-in-one navigational instrument. SPRINT-Nav combines a SPRINT INS sensor, Syrinx 600 kHz DVL (Doppler velocity log) and a high accuracy intelligent pressure sensor in a single unit.

Oceaneering’s E-ROV has already proven the ability for battery powered remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) working in the oil and gas industry to be piloted from shore. The company’s resident hybrid ROV Freedom builds on the E-ROV concept. Due to debut in offshore trials later this year, Freedom is targeting long, maintenance free-deployments, on autonomous missions and with support from shore-based pilots.

The vehicle will be based out of docking stations on the seabed, enabling it to recharge and download data before and after its subsea inspection, maintenance and repair missions.

Oceaneering Jami Cheramie, said: “Both of these systems have been developed to drive a step-change in inspection, repair and maintenance operations in subsea oil and gas fields, to help both increase uptime, operational flexibility and autonomy. A single hybrid instrument for their navigational needs.”

“Tight integration of the separate sensors within SPRINT-Nav as well as the use of high-specification Ring Laser Gyros are behind the high performance our customers are seeing from these units. Combined with their compact form factor, these results are seeing SPRINT-Nav fast becoming the INS instrument of choice for resident vehicles,” said Char Franey, sales manager for Survey and Construction at Sonardyne in Houston.

“They’re free from the calibration routines otherwise required and, because they also run on a unique dual engine algorithm, powering the INS and Gyro compass, initialization is fast and gaps in navigation are few and far between. Thanks to these qualities, SPRINT-Nav is not only ideally suited to subsea resident vehicle applications, but also autonomous and unmanned underwater vehicle (AUV/UUV) navigation.”