A Year Underwater

The ARV-i can spend up to 12 months underwater continuously monitoring underwater aquaculture-, oil and gas- and wind farm installations that require observation and inspection.

Transmark Subsea have partnered with Drone manufacturer Boxfish Research to develop the smart tetherless Drone “ARV-i”.

The partners introduced their new underwater observation vehicle at the Ocean Business 21 event in Southampton in October.

Observes and Inspects

ARV-i provides a range of operational configurations. As a resident vehicle, it can spend up to 12 months underwater per deployment.

– We assessed the market for small battery-powered ROV systems that we could make underwater-dockable with our WiSub pinless connection product line, to deliver a complete resident solution enabling remote underwater operations from shore, says Mark Bokenfohr, Business Development Manager in Transmark Subsea.

– Our successful co-development of the highly configurable and flexible ARV-i platform with the talented Boxfish team in New Zealand confirms that we established the right collaboration; field installation and ongoing operations bring further confidence that our global cooperation is bringing something new and valuable to the market, Bokenfohr states.

The system is designed to be autonomous, using prior programming and onboard intelligence to locate and observe underwater assets. When its battery is low or mission completed, ARV-i will autonomously return to its docking station for wireless battery charging and transfer of data collected from the completed excursion.

Transmark Subsea has identified their patented pinless connection as the key enabler of subsea vehicle residency, which they wish to demonstrate with the ARV-i drone and dock. The ARV-i system is the first to apply their new 150-Watt Maelstrom connector, delivering a 3x increase in power transfer within the same small volume as the original 50W product released in 2013. They have equivalently extended a 3x power increase to their award-winning Torden product to enable 3000-Watt docking for larger underwater vehicle systems aiming to become resident, intending to deliver docks for these systems as well.

With its small size (610x400x360 mm), the ARV-i enables operation in tight spaces; an eight-thruster design offers superior stability and manoeuvrability. ARV-i can also be equipped with up to six machine vision cameras, additional 4K navigation camera, and 17,000 lumens of lighting.

ARV-i will undergo acceptance trials in the fjords of Western Norway this December and will be performing services for fishfarms within January 2022.

Cluster Contributions

GCE Ocean Technology supported Transmark Subsea in securing partial funding for the development of the ARV-i from Innovation Norway.

– Being part of the cluster helps us build innovation projects like this one, in this case supporting us in the application for financing and the search and assessment of suitable partners. We’re looking forward to working even closer with the cluster during the introduction of ARV-i more broadly into the market, both here in Norway and abroad, Bokenfohr concludes.