Dynamic Positioning

Dynamic Positioning

In many offshore operations, precise and reliable dynamic positioning is critical to avoiding costly and devastating damages to equipment and subsea structures. Zupt offers inertial navigation systems that, when coupled with Differential GPS (DGPS) and/or Acoustic technologies such as USBL, offer superior accuracy and reliability for our customers’ offshore operations.
Zupt’s D-PINS greatly reduces the cost and risk associated with conventional reference sensor system outages by providing accurate positioning during these outage periods. Our D-PINS inertial navigation system greatly reduces costs associated with rig and construction vessel time. D-PINS can be easily integrated with any DP desk and system configuration, and is the most cost effective method of adding redundancy to existing DP systems.

Reliable Position Reference Sensors

The most reliable deep water sensors for dynamic positioning are DGPS, Acoustic and Inertial Navigation. While both DGPS and Acoustic technologies are generally regarded as reliable, they have drawbacks such as signal degradation due to scintillation, weather, or noise interference. While inertial navigation cannot be used alone, it can be used in tandem with DGPS and/or Acoustic to offer reliability and improved accuracy, as well as heading and attitude information. The combination of INS with any of these others systems will also provide immediate information on the quality and validity of the other positioning systems as an appropriate position reference sensor. If the GPS is becoming degraded, the combined solution will warn of this much sooner than the GPS system will halt its output. If the USBL systems is degraded because of a vessel backing down and sending prop wash over the DP USBL transceiver head, the inertial solution will immediately notify the operators of the failure of the USBL component of the combined solution. Reliability and knowledge of position reference sensor quality is key to DP operations.

USBL Smoothing for Dynamic Positioning

Repeatability in acoustic navigation systems is key to proper dynamic positioning. Zupt’s D-PINS system dramatically increases the repeatability of existing USBL solutions. Our inertial navigation system intelligently combines the noisy USBL data with very high update rate, low noise inertial data.