Where have we been – ROVs
The existing ROV technology is already employed for other construction tasks, such as subsea flowline pull–in and connection, or support for underwater cable burial and maintenance operations, as well as the associated survey work, with the former tasks seeing power levels on the vehicles reaching 200hp and beyond. It is also not unusual to see ROVs of 75–100hp being used in drilling support tasks. Drill–cutting removal using high–powered dredges is a common task in this area. ROVs are also deployed to operate subsea equipment which is not directly controlled from the surface (such as cross–over and isolation valves on trees and manifolds) although, in the latter case, parallel developments in the through–water acoustic telemetry may bring much more subsea hardware under direct surface control. This same acoustic telemetry will be used for supervisory control of AUVs
