Autonomous Aquatic Inspection and Intervention

(A2I2) Extension Programme

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The behaviour of the vehicle was adapted from the main A2I2 programme. Once this was agreed as a set of System Requirements Allocated to Software (SRATS), D-RisQ was able to turn round the development of the new software within two weeks. This was using Kapture® for the software requirements, undertaking a manual review with Rovco, adjusting where necessary either the SRATS or the software requirements. We then undertook a design in Simulink and then verified that the design satisfied the software requirements. Code was automatically produced and some limited test/simulation was undertaken prior to delivery to Rovco for integration onto the vehicle. Some adjustments were subsequently required but the whole process took less than 2 weeks.

The demonstration and further trials were conducted at the Offshore Renewable Energy Catapult facility at Blyth. While the software had been run through simulations, this was the first time that it had been integrated onto the vehicle. It was also the first time in-water tests were to be conducted for this version of the software. The software worked first time, exactly as expected. The vehicle had various sensors and, for these trials, a qualified Remotely Operated Vehicle driver. Every time he tried to make the vehicle collide with an obstacle, the vehicle ...or rather our software... refused and he commented that “It’s like skidding on glass” and “this would be great for training [operators as they simply could not collide with anything]”. The first set of trials and demonstrations were in the dock and then taken off-shore the following day, throughout all of which the software worked perfectly.

The actual C code was not verified formally as, at the time, we had not completed development of CLawZ® which would automatically, formally verify the output of the autocoder. Similarly, we had not developed our automatic binary code formal verification tool, FEVER®. Over the next few months, both of these tools will be developed and made available for use. In particular, they will be used on our 2 further subsea projects SEAMless and Demeter; more details on these projects and FEVER in 2024.

The A2I2 consortium members gratefully acknowledge the support funding from Innovate UK without which this project would not be possible.

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