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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. |