ECA Group, a leading manufacturer of advanced robotics and intelligent solutions for the offshore industry, will showcase the latest generation of subsea robotic inspection and intervention systems at DOT Monaco, booth G219.
Systems on display will include the roving bat hull inspection ROV and crawler, the H300 compact ROV and the ALISTAR 3000 oilfield-inspection AUV, which will be featured in front of the main entrance to the DOT exhibition. The industry’s first fully electric, five-function manipulator arm will also be on show alongside hydraulic remote-controlled manipulator arms.
The roving bat ROV and crawler inspects the hulls of ships, floating production, storage and offloading vessels (FPSOs), underwater structures and hydraulic dams. The roving bat is currently in service with Brazil’s oil and gas giant, Petrobras, for the inspection of their FPSOs. It features six built-in thrusters, making it very powerful and capable of withstanding the strongest of currents for stable and reliable inspection.
ECA’s H300 is a small, lightweight inspection ROV rated to a depth of 300m. Rapidly deployed from any ship or platform, the H300 is equipped with high-resolution sonar, video camera and spotlights and is particularly adapted to inspection and diver-support tasks.
The ALISTAR 3000 AUV is rated to a depth of 3,000m and performs inspection tasks on ultra-deep offshore oilfields. ALISTAR’s unique hovering capacities, small spread and lack of winch / umbilical provide operators with greater flexibility and faster operation to inspect pipelines, risers or mooring lines, and also for touch-down monitoring and post-lay surveys. The high-performance AUV also collects data during inspection and stocks information for post-processing data analysis, making it highly suitable for survey missions.
A range of underwater, remotely operated manipulator arms developed by ECA’s UK subsidiary, CSIP, will be on display, including the only fully electric arm on the market, the ARM 5E. The electric, five-function arm has a lift capacity of 25kg and can be mounted in the same footprint as a conventional hydraulic arm without the use of a skid, valve pack or hydraulic pump. This saves weight and allows greater vehicle manoeuvrability.
The hydraulic manipulator, ARM 7H, is very flexible and agile due to a pincer device at the end of its arm, which enables it to pick up objects as small as 5mm or as large as 150mm.