Teaching robots to cooperate underwater

Professor Asgeir J. Sørensen will lead the new NTNU-VISTA Center for autonomous operations subsea.

"Our goal is to develop technology that in the short term can reduce the environmental footprint of industry at sea while reducing environmental risk. In the longer term, the technology could become part of a subsea infrastructure of great importance for monitoring and understanding the biology, chemistry, physics and dynamics in the ocean and on the seabed," says Sørensen.

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and Equinor are supporting NTNU with a grant of NOK 25 million for the new research center. The Departments of Marine Technology and Engineering Cybernetics are receiving the research funding of NOK 5 million a year for five years. NTNU is contributing additional financing.

Aiming to be part of the Ocean Space Center

The center will benefit from infrastructure that has already been established in the port of Trondheim and hopes to become part of the infrastructure of the anticipated Ocean Space Center. Sørensen believes that the new center can have an impact on Norway's role internationally as a major power at sea.

"If we succeed in building infrastructure for digitization at sea and at the same time get different robot systems to work together underwater, on water and in the air, we'll be able to exponentially increase the operational capabilities and economic viability for data capture in mapping and monitoring the ocean," he says.

The center is one of several new centers emerging from NTNU AMOS, which is led by Sørensen.

"The new center will significantly escalate the work and focus on marine robotics. It will also strengthen the research efforts that NTNU, SINTEF, Equinor and the Research Council of Norway have invested in laboratories and infrastructure associated with the AUR-Lab / Ocean lab, which will be an important part of the future Ocean Space Center," says Sørensen.

Autonomous robots open up completely new possibilities

Our knowledge of ocean areas is still limited. Detailed observations are far more challenging to carry out at sea than in the atmosphere.

Autonomous underwater vehicles—in collaboration with other robotic platforms on the Earth's surface, in the air and in space—open up completely new possibilities for researching and monitoring the ocean.

By using autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), we can gain a better understanding of marine ecosystems that are crucial for value creation and management in the ocean.

AUVs also open up many new opportunities to develop the marine industry through robotic inspection and intervention. This is important for offshore wind energy production and aquaculture, as well as for safer installations, operations and maintenance for the offshore gas and oil industry.

Trondheim a world leader

A key focus area in the new center is how AUVs will navigate between specified installations, inspect the installations and possibly perform a task before returning to their own permanent parking station on the seabed for updates and maintenance.

The design of the equipment's technology is based on solving non-linear differential equations of the hydrodynamics and mechanics that describe the movements of the robot, the installation or the ship.

The research group in Trondheim is a world leader in the development of the mathematical basis for a general snake robot, the construction of this type of robot and the development of control systems and autonomy for marine robotics.

"The center's ambitions are important for the long-term national utilization of our ocean resources while also maintaining environmental awareness as paramount," says VISTA board chairman Ole M. Sejersted.

Bergen also gaining new VISTA research center

The expert group that considered the application from Professor Sørensen states that the center will deliver scientific knowledge at the highest international level and develop an academic environment in fields such as marine cybernetics, marine robotics, artificial intelligence and hydrodynamics.

Four professors developed the application to VISTA to fund a center for autonomous underwater operations. Sørensen was joined by Professor Kristin Ytterstad Pettersen, Professor Martin Ludvigsen and Adjunct Professor Kjetil Skaugset.

(In the interest of transparency, please note that Skaugset sits on the VISTA board as a representative of Equinor. He excused himself from participating in the processing of the applications, in line with normal practice. The award is made after evaluation by an independent, international expert group.)

A total of eight center applications were received. VISTA has also provided support for the establishment of a center at the University of Bergen led by Inga Berre, professor of applied mathematics. This center will be called the "VISTA Center for modeling of coupled subsurface dynamics" and will develop basic knowledge about how liquids and gasses move in porous media.

Provided by Norwegian University of Science and Technology