ALIVE: An Autonomous Light Intervention Vehicle

With the growing trend to develop deep and ultra-deep fields, the offshore oil and gas industry is increasingly demanding tools for cost-effective, reliable exploitation and maintenance of subsea equipment. Over the past decades, ROVs and ROTs have proven to be very efficient and versatile. These vehicles have become more sophisticated; however, they still require a great amount of electrical energy as well as constant, real-time supervision/control by highly trained operators. Support vessels are therefore clearly the primary part of operating expenditures (OPEX) for inspection, maintenance and repair (IMR) of deepwater field, and the only way to suppress them is to remove the intervention vehicle’s umbilical, that is to turn ROVs into Intervention-AUVs (I-AUV).