Autonomous Load Handling

In the last few decades, rapid advancements have been made in the development of automated processes due to the ever-increasing availability of processing power, as computers are getting more and more powerful. The marine and offshore industries have historically been slow to adopt these solutions, largely due to challenging operational conditions and very strict reliability and safety requirements. Downtime in this industry is prohibitively expensive and thus the resistance to change has been strong. In recent years, however, this view has begun to change, and the industry has become more open to the idea of technology assisting and improving the operations. Red Rock Marine (RRM), being one of the leading suppliers of lifting equipment in the region, is intending to spearhead this transition. The prime objective is to create a synergistic partnership between academia and industry to create solutions that cater to future needs and challenges. The aim is to deliver fully autonomous load handling equipment that leads to more reliable, safer, and cost-effective operations. This can be achieved by developing individual ?automation modules? that can be utilized separately or in various combinations to achieve partial or full autonomy. This modular approach not only helps in separating the project into smaller more manageable goals but also provides the opportunity for the incremental design leading towards full autonomy. An example of this modular design would be ?Collision Avoidance? which on its own could assist the operator, ?Landing Assist? which would be able to set down the load in place and ?Path Tracking? that could move the load from one location to another. Each of these can function on its own but put the three together and we would have ?Auto Landing? which could safely move the load to a specific location and set it down. This approach can be expanded upon and every step increases the autonomy of the system.

In the last few decades, rapid advancements have been made in the development of automated processes due to the ever-increasing availability of processing power. The marine and offshore industries have historically been slow to adopt these solutions, largely due to challenging operational conditions and very strict reliability and safety requirements. Downtime in this industry is prohibitively expensive and thus the resistance to change has been strong. In recent years, however, this view has begun to change, and the industry has become more open to the idea of technology assisting and improving the operations. Red Rock Marine (RRM), being one of the leading suppliers of lifting equipment in the region, is intending to spearhead this transition. The existing solutions often rely on ideal conditions and unrealistically responsive actuators. Tailoring these solutions will at best require extensive modifications and at worst are simply not feasible in the physical environments. The project intends to fill this gap and to provide insight into the practical application of existing solutions as well as the development of new tools for automating lifting operations. This points to instrumentation and actuation challenges that arise under difficult environments imposed by weather and sea conditions.