A new European project named Kraken has started. The project received €350.000 through financing of OCEANERANET (Ocean Energy European Research Area Network) and gathers four partners of three different countries: WavEC Offshore Renewables and Instituto Super Técnico (Portugal), SIANI (Canary Islands) and CADFEM (Ireland).

The partners encountered in Lisbon, Portugal, at the end of July for the kick-off meeting and established the first actions of this new project.

The Kraken project aims to tackle the existing gap of the ROV tools specially designed for the ocean energy sector needs with the objective to reduce the high OPEX costs associated to the underwater inspection, maintenance and repair (IRM).

The development of a maintenance system that can be installed in any inspection/general class ROV and carry out all the services currently performed by divers and a good range of those performed by larger ROVs should reportedly decrease logistics and consequently the operational costs for the underwater IRM services by 50%.

Kraken brings telemanipulation technologies from surgical rooms into the deep sea. Kraken’s objective is to improve the performance level of the offshore IRM operations by completely avoiding the human hazard of using divers and to reduce significantly the costs of work class ROVs by using smaller inspection ROVs deployed from much smaller vessels at a fraction of the cost.