Thursday, 31 May 2012 00:00

Norwegian survey and positioning specialists, iSURVEY Group AS, has chosen to invest in a SPRINT (Subsea Precision Reference Inertial Navigation Technology) system from Sonardyne International to support its ROV surveys and deep water marine construction activities. The purchase follows trials of the system in the North Sea during which SPRINT was subjected to a detailed technical appraisal and was shown to deliver immediate cost savings and major operational benefits.

The core of SPRINT is the Lodestar inertial platform. The unit is depth rated up to 5,000 metres and has an in-built battery backup that can maintain inertial and AHRS algorithms for up to two hours if external power is lost.

iSURVEY will be using SPRINT to support a wide variety of multi-beam seabed surveys using deep-rated ROVs. The system has been developed by Sonardyne to exploit the long term accuracy and precision characteristics of acoustic positioning techniques with the continuous availability and fast update rate of state-of-the-art inertial navigation sensors. SPRINT’s integrated solution offers considerable improvements for positioning subsea vehicles, both in terms of precision and reliability as the system can continue to provide a reliable output when acoustic techniques become marginal due to sea state, water depth or operating range.

“Multi-beam surveys and ROV support for subsea construction are a key part of our service offering,” said Kenneth Leverskjaer, Project Manager at iSURVEY. “We were impressed with SPRINT’s performance from the first time we deployed it. Not only has it helped to extend the operating limits of our USBL acoustic system, we can get a position update for our ROV 100 times a second. This greatly aids vehicle control, visualisation and also survey data quality.”

Commenting on the sale, Alan MacDonald, Sales Manger at Sonardyne said, “iSURVEY has been a long-time user of Sonardyne acoustic technology and we are delighted that the company has recognised the technical and commercial advantages SPRINT INS can bring to their operations both in Norway and across the globe.”

For more information about SPRINT click here.