An artificial intelligence (AI) tool capable of identifying small boulders in offshore environments has been developed by renewable energy industry supplier Ocean Geophysics.

According to developers, boulder fields, featuring boulders of all sizes, pose a particular challenge for the planning of offshore wind farms and cable routes. As such, an analysis of the seabed is a required ahead of any construction work ahead of the placement of wind turbines, substations or subsea cables for offshore wind farm developments.

Source: Ocean Geophysics

Ocean Geophysics developed their new AI-driven boulder identification tool, which uses a machine learning algorithm to automatically detect boulders as small as 25 cm in size and automatically removes duplicates.

According to the company, the software can reportedly perform entire seabed surveys quickly, taking roughly one second per side-scan line to detect all boulders.

The AI-driven technology is expected to simplify and expedite the boulder identification process — which can take weeks or even months to complete manually — with the promise of time and cost savings for offshore developers.