Seafloor seismic acquisition using autonomous underwater vehicles

Abstract

Although narrow‐azimuth towed‐streamer data provide good image quality for structural interpretation, it is generally accepted that for wide‐azimuth marine surveys seabed receivers deliver superior seismic reflection measurements and seismically derived reservoir attributes. However, seabed surveys are not widely used due to the higher acquisition costs when compared to streamer acquisition. In recent years, there have been significant engineering efforts to automate receiver deployment and retrieval in order to minimize the cost differential and conduct cost‐efficient seabed receiver seismic surveys. These engineering efforts include industrially engineered nodes, nodes on a rope deployment schemes and even robotic nodes, which swim to and from the deployment location. This move to automation is inevitable, leading to robotization of seismic data acquisition for exploration and development activities in the oil and gas industry. We are developing a robotic‐based technology, which utilizes autonomous underwater vehicles as seismic sensors without the need of using a remotely operated vehicle for deployment and retrieval. In this paper, we describe the autonomous underwater vehicle evolution throughout the project years from initial heavy and bulky nodes to fully autonomous light and flexible underwater receivers. Results obtained from two field pilot tests using different generations of autonomous underwater vehicles indicate that the seismic coupling, and navigation based on underwater acoustics are very reliable and robust.

Wi-Buoy: An Energy-Efficient Wireless Buoy Network for Real-Time High-Rate Marine Data Acquisition

“…Overall, an increase in the wind speed leads to a larger value for p out , resulting in a higher acquisition time in (4). This in turn reduces the maximum achievable sleep duration in (14) and the resultant power conservation performance. In particular, the latency requirement cannot be met at compression ratios of 10 (802.11ax) and 20 (802.11n) in the case of slight and moderate SSCs.…”

“…AUVs are touted to become an important component of marine OBS acquisition systems in the future. A group of AUVs, each towing a string of hydrophones, can be operated at a certain depth to record low-noise data as compared to conventional streamers [14]. Although AUVs cannot capture the elastic wavefield component, they can complement OBS acquisition systems by enabling flexible receiver topologies.…”

“…• Real-Time Data Delivery: A desirable feature would be to receive all the recorded seismic data at the SV in With a sophisticated on-board processing system, the crew can get a first-hand look at the seismic images without having to wait for prolonged periods to analyze the seismic traces. Real-time acquisition at the SV can enable scenarios where a group of AUVs is guided to a desired location and depth [14] affects the quality of the seismic data but also hampers the movement of the SV. Furthermore, the survey is halted when the presence of any animals (that depend on acoustic communication) is detected within the survey area [1], [5].…”

“…However, in the case of adaptive data compression, for example, a more generalized G/D [K l ] /1 batch service model must be considered for analysis. (14) into (12).…”

“…A primary contribution of this article is a wireless buoy network architecture called Wi-Buoy that can achieve real-time, high-rate, and energyefficient marine data acquisition, via Radio Frequency (RF) communication links over the ocean surface. The use of recently proposed technologies such as Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) [14] are also evaluated and incorporated into Wi-Buoy. The proposed architecture is compliant with the IEEE 802.11 standard and can be augmented by the Buoy-Based Power Saving Backhaul (B-PSB) scheme to attain optimal power conservation performance through a cross-layer design.…”