Known as a biomimetic autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV), RoboFish has been designed as a safe, low-cost method of carrying out inspections of offshore wind turbines. Watch this video to find out more:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hHhRAZa2T0&t=24s

The issue

The role of offshore wind, including floating offshore wind energy, will grow significantly over the coming decades. It is forecast that by 2050, 12 per cent of the world’s primary energy supply will come from wind energy, and 20 per cent of this will come from offshore wind. However, ongoing wear and corrosion from the harsh sea environment drives up cost and introduces downtime to this supply.

Material corrosion is currently being inspected using underwater remotely operated vehicles which generally need tethers and a human operator, and are limited in their accessibility and manoeuvrability. 

What will RoboFish do?

Our researchers are developing an agile and efficient biomimetic AUV which will continuously inspect the foundations of offshore wind turbines and drastically reduce human risk, maintenance costs, and operational constraints.

RoboFish replicates the full-body movement of an eel or trout allowing greater agility in close proximity to structures and better energy efficiency of movement compared to conventional AUV designs.

This prototype currently uses vision for close-range navigation and inspection of structures, with the ability to build complete visual models of the structure by using 3D reconstruction methods.

Future versions will use a range of on-board sensors to record data about the off-shore wind turbines' status as well as localising and communicating using underwater modems. RoboFish aims to be a low cost and very power efficient underwater platform and could be spun out to a successful commercial product.

Explore the design in more detail

Project activities and publications

Visit the RoboFish YouTube channel for our latest updates. All of our publications will be published on the York Research Database.