Emerging autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) developments across the oil and gas industry now include pipeline inspection; structural survey; deepwater inspection, repair and maintenance (IRM); and field resident systems for remote/harsh environments. As these capabilities mature, AUVs will become an increasingly important tool for deepwater field operations. Early adoption of AUV standards will facilitate more rapid deployment of AUV technologies and enable the industry to reap a wide range of safety, environmental, operational, and economic benefits for its deepwater fields. The development of industry standards for AUV interfaces will facilitate more rapid implementation of AUV capabilities and lead to more cost-effective, compatible system designs by AUV vendors and field hardware manufacturers. The development of regulatory standards for the interpretation and acceptance of autonomous inspection results is also an essential step toward the achievement of more cost-effective operations and regulatory oversight of deepwater subsea fields. This paper describes a future vision for the use of AUVs in deepwater field operations, the benefits to be realized, and the future capabilities of AUVs that must be anticipated and facilitated within AUV standards to achieve that vision. Additionally, this paper describes the goals and objectives of DeepStar Project 11304, which is laying the groundwork to achieve accelerated standardization of AUV interfaces and the development of regulatory standards for AUV inspections.

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have successfully been introduced into Oil and Gas operations for Geophysical and Environmental surveys, replacing the traditional vessel based and towed system approaches. AUV development continues to advance rapidly, with the majority of the technology growth stemming from the defense industry's requirements. Total and Chevron have been working collaboratively to understand, influence, and adopt these advances in technology to enable sonar and visual pipeline inspections using AUVs. Together, the companies are developing a comprehensive approach to AUV pipeline inspection.AUVs have advantages and disadvantages compared to more conventional towed systems and remotely operated vehicle (ROV) systems with respect to pipeline inspection approach. In order to take full advantage of AUV attributes while minimizing the effect of AUV drawbacks, a change in the current pipeline inspection philosophy will need to be adopted. This change will require improvement of sensors, autonomy software, and data processing and management, as well as further development of technology gaps such as AUV navigation, real time 3D mapping, feature recognition, and communications between the AUV and intelligent sensors.The deliverables for the Total/Chevron collaboration effort will be new specifications for AUV pipeline inspection surveys that will help guide AUV suppliers and operators as they enhance their current capabilities to meet both companies' requirements for pipeline inspection. Included in the deliverables will be an in-depth analysis of the current AUV technology gaps in relation to internal integrity management systems for both companies.The new AUV-specific approach to pipeline inspection will provide better data quality and result in improved integrity management of subsea pipeline assets. The ability of AUVs to successfully perform pipeline inspections will also provide a stepping stone toward acceptance of AUVs as capable tools for additional inspection and light intervention programs, and will eventually lead to the development of field resident AUV systems.

This paper deals with underwater acoustic communication, and especially details an innovative approach for off the shelves existing modems performances evaluation. The originality is to be able to predict the operational performances of existing acoustic modems in a real complex situation, without sea trials.