UNDERWATER SURVEYING
Offshore drilling is a slow and expensive process, whether you're in the Gulf of Mexico or the Arctic Ocean. Before you can even start, you must map out every cliff, crack, and other ecologically important feature of the seafloor. This painstaking procedure costs thousands of dollars a day and requires dragging a deep-tow system from surface ships along survey lines. These cumbersome devices can't be maneuvered while submerged, rendering them useless in many locales.
Enter Mike Dupuis, operations manager for C&C Technologies in Lafayette, Louisiana. His company designed an unmanned mini-submarine, loaded to the gills with sonar and navigation devices, that can troll for 40 hours without wires and sink to 3,000 meters.
Called the Hugin 3000 - short for high-precision untethered geosurvey and inspection system - the minisub was built to C&C's specs by Kongsberg Gruppen, a Norwegian defense contractor. Using audible frequencies similar to those of a dialup modem, technicians can send location and steering data to the sub from a surface control vessel. The Hugin's aluminum and hydrogen-peroxide fuel cell generates current, and the electric motor turns the propeller's carbon blades to reach a relatively fast 4 knots. The Hugin can hover 130 feet above the seafloor and map objects as small as 6 inches, relaying sonar and profiling info to the surface in real time.
The C&C sub is the first to cash in on deep-sea autonomous underwater vehicle mapping, but competitors are looming. Bluefin, a spin-off from MIT, is building a similar sub for oil industry use with defense contractor Racal. "Although we made the Hugin available in January, we've been doing R&D for minor electronic and mechanical Band-Aids," says Dupuis, adding that the sub is now in full operation 90 percent of the time.
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