Bourbon Offshore

High sea adventure for a laser unit

When Bourbon, a French company providing offshore oil maritime services, decides to carry out a measurement campaign on the use of its transshipment equipment, it sets course for Picodev!

Piloting an oil exploration vessel is one thing. But keeping two boats side by side, in the open sea, and transferring equipment from one to the other using a crane installed on the deck is another. Especially if you add a pinch of swell and a hint of wind... This is the daily challenge faced by the Bourbon fleet, the shipowner having, moreover, to comply with safety standards specific to this type of cranes. These determine whether it is possible or not to proceed with transshipment operations depending on the sea state, weather, load to be lifted, etc. All these parameters, called "acceleration coefficients," had never been monitored to validate whether safety rules were perfectly respected, and if, in the end, there was over- or under-utilization of the cranes.

A prototype to measure and report

In 2017, Bourbon decided to carry out a measurement campaign and turned to Picodev. The company then created a small unit which, fixed at the top of the cranes, measures acceleration and the speed of lifting and lowering the load according to the swell. To make the prototype, Picodev kept it simple: a lidar, that is a detection laser, bought commercially, connected to a Raspberry Pi board, and coupled with a camera. And in order to retrieve the measurements (distance, speed, acceleration) recorded by the laser, Picodev designed the Wi-Fi communication interface between it and the ship’s deck. All this, completed by a signal processing filter and a photo display. All data is then transmitted to Bourbon, in Marseille, for sorting, processing, and implementation of corrective and improvement measures.

Technologies used: Python, Raspberry Pi, Wi-Fi, Lidar, Linux Learn more: www.bourbonoffshore.com