Nauticus Robotics develop subsea, autonomous robots with partner Shell, one of the world’s largest oil companies, to acquire subsea integrity data efficiently with some of the most advanced technology the ocean will have seen to date.
Shell will massively benefit from this as these advanced tools will provide further access to deep sea operations. Their collaboration grants their advancement to the qualification phase for a more efficient way of acquiring data from subsea areas. Shell are able to integrate their leading inspection tooling service into Nauticus robotic service solutions. This means that during their qualification phase, they can use remote operational autonomous tools to qualify for an offshore pilot project.
Todd Newell, SVP of Business Development at Nauticus had this to say:
“Working with a leading company such as Shell marks an exciting milestone for Nauticus, and this collaboration further validates the superior capabilities and extensive use cases of our robots across the energy sector.
“Implementing our supervised autonomous method – one that has proven more robust and dynamic than most of its kind – is expected to provide our partner and future customers more than 50 percent cost savings compared to today’s methods of operation.”
As we all know, ocean pollution is at an all-time high and the implementation of fully electric subsea equipment, deployed by surface vessels, are essential for fully sustainable transport, recharge, and communication in underwater operations.
The new means of conducting underwater work will benefit offshore services, allowing a wider acceptance of autonomous operations leading over more conventional ways.
Ross Doak, Shell’s deepwater robotics engineer, commented that;
“An exciting aspect of this project is the opportunity to combine the strengths of advanced inspection tooling with the advanced marine robotic capabilities developed by Nauticus Robotics.
“This project aims to fundamentally improve how we collect subsea facility data, through the combination of ‘AUV native’ tooling design, supervised autonomy, and recent improvements in remote communications.”