INDUSTRY FOCUS Renewable Energyy
UK’s most ambitious off shore wind farm
robotics project shares its successes Autonomous motherships and robot repair teams at offshore wind farms? On their way, says the MIMRee team
T
he Multi-Platform Inspection, Maintenance and Repair in Extreme Environments, or MIMRee, is a two-year project launched a year ago, funded by a £4.2m grant from Innovate UK. It’s been touted as one of UK’s off shore-wind most ambitious robotics projects to date. A year on and the MIMRee team
reports several breakthroughs in the project’s quest to demonstrate an end- to-end autonomous inspect-and-repair mission to off shore wind farms. Its goal is to demonstrate an autonomous system capable of planning its own operational missions to off shore wind farms, whereby a mothership will scan moving turbine blades on approach, then launch teams of inspection drones carrying blade crawlers for forensic inspection and repair of damaged blades. The project brings together expertise from the fi elds of robotics, non-destructive testing, artifi cial intelligence, space mission planning, marine and aerial engineering and nanobiotechnology. It aims to prove that off shore-wind operations and maintenance missions can be conducted by autonomous vessels, aerial vehicles and crawling robots.
“Robotics and autonomous systems
are vital to optimising off shore wind operations and meeting our net-zero targets by mid-century, a core objective of our Operations and Maintenance Centre of Excellence,” said Chris Hill, Operational Performance Director at the Off shore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult. “UK companies are well placed to lead this technological revolution and having a project like MIMRee home-grown in the UK, spearheaded by UK businesses and our leading academic institutions, gives us a competitive advantage for the supply chain of the future.”
ORE Catapult was established in 2013 by the UK government and is one of a network of Catapults set up by Innovate UK in high-growth industries. It is the UK’s fl agship technology innovation and research centre for off shore wind, wave and tidal energy, aiming to reduce the cost of off shore renewable energy, supporting the growth of the industry and creating
28 October 2020 | Automation
benefi ts for the UK. Part of MIMRee are eight industry and academic partners who work together on this game-changing new system that will build on their existing innovations: Plant Integrity, Off shore Renewable Energy Catapult, Thales, Wootzano, the universities of Bristol, Manchester and London, and The Royal College of Art.
Challenges and milestones The MIMRee Consortium reported a series of technological challenges already overcome in the fi rst year, evidencing the feasibility of their vision.
can rapidly switch between modules for cleaning, sanding and top-coating damaged areas of blades, providing real- time feedback visualisation and human-in- the-loop tele-operation of repair tasks via a user-interface system.
• Following experimentation with visible and short-wave infrared image capturing, Plant Integrity has produced the blade crawler’s non-destructive testing payload. The module uses an advanced machine-learning algorithm and a precision scanner for exact measurement of defects under a wide variety of ambient light conditions. • An electronic skin (left), called
Wootzano electronic skin for BladeBUG
The Thales imaging system has achieved blur-free images of moving wind turbine blades at the Off shore Renewable Energy (ORE) Catapult’s Levenmouth Demonstration Turbine off the coast of Fife (bottom right). Scanning blades for defects without stopping turbines for days at a time is considered a game-changer for wind farm operations.
The MIMRee mission planning software developed by Professor Sara Bernardini of Royal Holloway University of London has been integrated with the Thales vessel and the inspection drones developed by a team from Manchester and Bristol Universities. The drones have successfully coordinated launch, recovery and navigation from the vessel.
One of the aims of the project is to demonstrate an integrated inspect-and- repair system for wind turbine blades, using the BladeBUG robot, which has recently demonstrated its walking abilities on a variety of blade surfaces at ORE Catapult’s National Renewable Energy Centre. Recently achieved milestones related to the system include: • An autonomous repair arm, developed by Dr Sina Sareh’s team at the Royal College of Art Robotics Laboratory,
Wootzkin, patented by high-tech robotics company, Wootzano, will enable the robot to feel the surface of the blade. Wootzkin also allows the robot to determine the surface conditions of the blade, helping it to walk in extreme environments. Finally, Wootzkin enables the robot’s existing vacuum system to attach on to the blade more accurately by using supervised machine-learning algorithms.
“This time last year we could talk about a spectacular concept. A year in, we can say that MIMRee is not futorology, but an imminent possibility with a host of technological breakthroughs achieved. The project is developing a variety of spin-off technologies: the ability to scan a working turbine without stopping it for days while it is inspected is just one with a very obvious benefi t to industry,” said Martin Bourton, Project Lead at Plant Integrity.
The Thales Halcyon vessel
CONTACT:
ORE Catapult
ore.catapult.org.uk
automationmagazine.co.uk
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