Page 73 - The ROV Manual - A User Guide for Remotely Operated Vehicles 2nd edition
P. 73
FIGURE 3.6
Schilling Robotics UHD.
exceeding 3000 m deep. Due to necessity, the offshore industry has teamed with the ROV devel- opers to ensure integrated systems are being designed that can be installed, operated, and main- tained through the use of ROVs. ROVs, such as Schilling Robotics UHD ROV (Figure 3.6), are taking underwater intervention to a higher technological level.
In the late 1990s, a new entrant to market by the name of VideoRay brought micro-ROV tech- nology to common use. Followed shortly thereafter, SeaBotix entered the market with the Little Benthic Vehicle (LBV) and legitimized the micro-ROV as an affordable and useful ROV platform. Soon, sensor manufacturers began to tailor their products to fit in the smaller form factor, thus making the micro-ROV a fully industrial system.
By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, many manufacturers were entering into the market for OCROV and MSROV. On the educational front, several ROV-specific training programs were forming all over Europe and North America to cater to the ever-expanding fleet of operational industrial ROV systems. The Marine Advanced Technology Education (MATE) Center was formed in Monterey, California, in order to encourage high school and college-age enthusiasts into the field of subsea robotics. Today the MATE program sponsors international ROV competi- tions worldwide.
Also in the late 1990s (Wernli, 1998), it was estimated that there were over 100 vehicle manu- facturers, and over 100 operators using approximately 3000 vehicles of various sizes and capabili- ties. We will not even try to determine the OCROVs in the field today as the number of operational systems is growing almost exponentially. According to The World ROV Market Forecast 20112015, there were 747 WCROVs being operated by 21 major companies, not count- ing the systems involved in noncommercial operations. As far as the number of actual vehicles in the field today . . . well, tracking that number will be left to the statisticians.
3.2 Underwater vehicles to ROVs
Previous sections provided an introduction to what an ROV is and is not, along with a brief history of how these underwater robots arrived at their present level of worldwide usage. Since these
3.2 Underwater vehicles to ROVs 61
