Foundations & scour
Monopiles, transition pieces, J-tubes and the scour protection around them, inspected visually and with cathodic protection readings on a repeatable route, so corrosion and seabed movement become a trend rather than a finding.
Solution · Subsea
The asset does not stop at the waterline. The inspection usually does.
Foundations, scour protection, cable corridors, quay walls, hulls: the part of the asset nobody sees is the part that fails quietly. werob integrates underwater robots from real manufacturers so the submerged half gets inspected on a cadence instead of after an incident.
1.764
offshore wind turbines in Germany
Solution · Subsea
Below the waterline, the vessel is the cost.
Germany had 1,764 offshore wind turbines feeding the grid at the end of June 2026, roughly 10.8 GW across 31 fully operational wind farms (Deutsche WindGuard, first half of 2026). Every one of them stands on a foundation with scour protection and is connected by an array cable, and all of that sits under water. One number from that report decides more than any other: the average water depth of the German stock is 31 metres. An observation-class vehicle rated to 305 metres therefore reaches every one of them, which means the routine inspection case does not need a work-class system or a DP2 vessel at all. The same is true of quay walls, lock gates, dam intakes and ship hulls. The reason these surfaces get inspected less often than they should is rarely the robot. It is that a crewed support vessel is the dominant cost of any offshore campaign, so inspection gets batched into a campaign and the interval stretches. Anything that removes a vessel day, or moves the pilot ashore, changes that arithmetic more than a better camera does.
What the robot runs
Cable & pipeline corridors
Survey along the corridor with sonar, sub-bottom profiler and magnetometer to find free spans, lost depth of cover and exposure. The as-laid record and the as-found record drift apart over time, and only a repeat survey shows by how much.
Hull & biofouling
In-water hull inspection and proactive grooming before a fouling layer establishes itself. Roughness costs fuel, and most ports now require the removed material to be captured rather than washed into the harbour.
Ports, locks & dams
Quay walls, sheet piling, lock gates, dam intakes and trash racks. Inland and harbour work is where turbidity, not depth, is the limiting factor, which changes the sensor choice completely.
Hardware match
- Saab Seaeye
- Blueye
- EvoLogics Quadroin
- Exail A18-M
Connectors
- CMMS / Asset-Register
Standards
- IACS UR Z17
- MEPC.378(80)
- KRITIS-DachG
- BSH
- DGUV V 40
Built for the submerged half
| What the operator described | Hardware match | Cadence | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| “Observation-class ROV flies a fixed route around foundations and scour protection, capturing the same waypoints each pass so corrosion and seabed change read as a trend.” | Blueye · Saab Seaeye | Per campaign | Available |
| “Survey AUV runs the cable or pipeline corridor with sonar and sub-bottom profiler, so depth of cover and free spans are measured rather than assumed.” | Exail A18-M · EvoLogics Quadroin | Annual | Available |
| “Hull robot grooms a still-clean hull at short intervals and documents the condition, with the removed material captured as the port requires.” | Hull grooming and cleaning robots | Per port call | Available |
Subsea is a newly available werob solution. Hardware and cadence are representative; per-asset scope is set in your spec. The figure above describes the addressable market in Germany (1,764 offshore wind turbines in operation, Deutsche WindGuard, 30 June 2026), not live deployments. Statutory and class-society survey remains with the class society and the accredited inspector; the robot delivers the capture, not the certificate.
Subsea questions
- Does this replace commercial divers?
- Not across the board, and anyone claiming otherwise has not been offshore. A robot is better than a diver at repeatable inspection, at depth, in cold water and on long survey lines, because it does not get tired and it flies the same route every time. A diver is still better at unplanned, dexterous intervention in a confined space. The honest reason to use a robot first is that it removes a person from a hazardous environment for the routine work, so the diving hours that remain are the ones that genuinely need a human.
- How deep, and what actually limits the work?
- Depth is rarely the binding constraint for civil assets, and the German numbers show it plainly: the average water depth of the offshore wind stock is 31 metres (Deutsche WindGuard, 30 June 2026), while a common observation-class vehicle is rated to 305 metres. The routine case therefore has an order of magnitude of headroom. What actually stops work is turbidity, current and weather window. In a harbour or a reservoir you can be limited to almost no optical visibility at five metres, which is why sonar, laser profiling and acoustic positioning matter more than camera resolution.
- How does the vehicle know where it is? There is no GPS under water.
- Correct, and that is the part most people underestimate. Positioning runs on acoustics, typically USBL from a surface vessel or LBL from seabed transponders, combined with an inertial navigation system and a Doppler velocity log. Without that, an inspection produces pictures but not positions, and a finding you cannot locate again is not much use on the next survey.
- Can a robot clean a hull anywhere?
- No, and this is a regulatory question rather than a technical one. Many ports and coastal states restrict or prohibit in-water cleaning unless the removed material is captured and filtered, because biofouling transfers invasive species between waters. Aggressive cleaning of an established fouling layer can also damage the antifouling coating and make the next fouling cycle worse. That is why the sensible pattern is frequent, gentle grooming of a hull that is still clean, planned against the port call and the coating warranty.
- Which robots are we actually talking about?
- Real, purchasable platforms, several of them European: Saab Seaeye for observation and work-class ROV, Blueye from Norway for compact inspection, EvoLogics in Berlin with the Quadroin micro-AUV, and Exail in France with the A18-M survey AUV. werob is manufacturer-independent and picks the vehicle from the water, the task and the corridor rather than from a catalogue.
- Where does werob stop and wedrone start?
- The waterline is the boundary. Below it, it is werob: foundations, scour, cables, hulls, quay walls. Above it, it is wedrone: blade and tower inspection, platform and structure capture from the air, and light logistics out to the asset. Offshore assets almost always need both, and they are specified together.
Start
Inspect the half of the asset nobody sees.
Describe the structure, the water and the interval in plain language. First spec in 48 hours, first deployment in eight weeks.