Safety Net: Unmanned offshore search and rescue

VISION

To develop Safety Net, a resident marine based autonomous search and rescue service that will enable three significant changes in the design and operation of offshore wind farms to improve safety and profitability.

Change 1: Provide 24/7 rapid emergency response for offshore wind farms that reduces casualty recovery time frames helping to save lives at sea. An unmanned solution eliminates the need for a secondary manned vessel to provide emergency response onsite, reducing the number of technicians required to work offshore which reduces the overall risk profile and the risk of COVID-19 transmission between personnel.

Change 2: Enable offshore wind farm layout optimisation to improve the profitability of offshore wind farms. A resident marine-based search and rescue service removes the constraint of helicopter search and rescue which requires sites to be built in grid patterns.

Change 3: Enable helicopter only operations for rapid repair/breakdown response. Current guidance requires a secondary means of rescue within 30 minutes of a helicopter in the event of an emergency. Safety Net would cover this requirement enabling helicopters to deploy without backup vessels.

OBJECTIVES/ FOCUS

This project will bring the partners together required to develop a turn key search and rescue service. The partners will be integrating several state-of-the-art technologies with high TRL values and applying these in a novel manner.

Working with our technology partners the key objectives are:

* Create a machine learning / Artificial Intelligence (AI) solution to save lives. Employing input from both aerial and onboard multispectral sensors the solution will:- Autonomously navigate all deployed assets to the casualties, identified by location beacon or VHF DR.
* Identify the signature of one or more casualties in the water.
* autonomously manoeuvre assets, according to prevailing conditions, Collision Regulations and casualty location to a position where the casualty can be recovered
* Employ the novel Casualty Conveyor Rescue System to recover conscious or unconscious casualties from the water to a place of shelter where their needs can be remotely assessed.
* Employing a data solution, to communicate sensory and multispectral data from both aerial and surface assets to a Remote Operations Centre. The solution must provide primary low latency, high capacity bandwidth from a moving asset in multiple degrees of freedom
* Employing 5G and fiber optic networks to provide secondary resilient communication via mobile assets and the Launch and Recovery System (LARS) base stations.

By developing, testing and integrating these technologies we aim to offer the worlds first offshore autonomous marine based search and rescue service, helping to save lives at sea and build the wind farms of the future.