Greater concern about the safety of deploying personnel into an underwater environment is one of the drivers for pursuing new ways to survey subsurface assets. In response, AUVs are seeing broader use in the oil and gas industry. Because AUVs have no umbilical and can operate at a distance from a host support vessel, they offer a number of advantages over the industry-dominant ROVs. Unlike tethered ROVs, AUVs can work in obstructed areas, maneuvering themselves to a work site using a self-contained power system and finding their way in a particular direction at a specified depth and speed using internal and external positioning sources. AUVs typically are more compact than ROVs and can work much more closely to the assets and with the potential of producing more accurate data.
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