Abstract

The increasing sophistication of offshore projects within the realms of renewable energy, as well as the oil and gas industry, makes the need for effective asset integrity management even more crucial. In these challenging working environments, ROVs, or remotely operated vehicles, have become indispensable for inspecting, maintaining, and monitoring these marine environments. This focuses on the evolution of ROV technology and its applications in inspection, digital asset management, and offshore integrity, to which ROVs are omnipresent. ROVs visually and photogrammetrically inspect the offshore wind turbine foundation and measure the ultrasonic thickness of pipes, and also survey cathodic protection on subsea pipelines and risers. This means they work under specially controlled environments and attend to tasks that are better achieved without the use of Deep-Sea Divers. This proves rational as ROVs reduce operational risks and work more efficiently in high-risk, Deepwater conditions. There are supporting systems and software that inspect and optimize data, and these ROVs work best when combined with the data engineering platforms as FDVR, COABIS, and SENSE. ROVs can use the data to create insights, and have history comparison, anomaly detection, compliance, and digital twin capabilities for predictive maintenance. The incorporation of ROV inspection custom technologies into such platforms improves decision-making and complements ROV risk-based inspection strategies. ROVs' operational issues, such as weather dependency, excessive amounts of data, and sensor integration problems, continue to streamline ROVs through increased autonomy, sensor fusion, and Artificial Intelligence recognition of defects. As the scale and complexity of the offshore energy systems continue to grow, the ROVs will be critical in maintaining structural safety, compliance with regulations, and sustainability. ROVs will also be critical in the integration of digital tools for the inspection and management of offshore assets, giving ROVs the primary position in the management of offshore assets and integrity.