Adaptive Inspection of Submarine Cable for Operating Environment Based on Remote Operated Vehicle

Abstract

Regularly, inspections about the operating environment of submarine cables could help to find risk points such as exposing, suspending, and weakened mechanical protection of submarine cables, which facilitates timely adjustment of operation and maintenance strategies and measures to repair the mechanical protection to prevent the cables from being damaged by external forces. Based on PID and fuzzy control theory, a series of automatic control technologies such as auto cable tracking, auto depth, auto attitude, auto pitch, auto heading, auto positioning, etc. of Remote Operated Vehicle are proposed, which can be automatically controlled according to the direction of submarine cable routing, submarine topography and environmental changes. So as adjust the attitude of the Remote Operated Vehicle, realize the adaptive detection of the operating environment of the submarine cable, and it helps to improve the intelligence of the detection operation, and reduce the excessive intervention from the pilots during the detection process. This technology was successfully applied for the 500kV submarine cable inspection of Hainan Interconnection Project in 2019. The Remote Operated Vehicle detected along the submarine cables routing under the strong cross-current or fixed-point hovering. In this detection, several exposing and suspending of the cable was successfully found.