Aim of the “MUM– Large Modifiable Underwater Mothership” Project is to explore near-future technology unlocking the potential of large UUVs within the next decade. We present a highly modular and variable unmanned underwater vehicle family, providing novel operational and technical concepts for efficient and economic subsea tasks and works under harsh conditions. The new vehicle class brings unconventional ideas to the table towards solving the needs of the offshore oil and gas industry regarding cost efficiency and reduced manning:

The design of modular building block systems allows a focused mission-dependent module assembly. A scalable fuel cell based energy system, based on proven submarine technology will power the MUM throughout even long-term deployments. New developments in autonomy, navigation, and communication enable autonomous missions which usually require permanent operator control. With payloads or toolboxes up to ten tons, the MUM system will largely extend the possible tasks for UUVs. This concept design is going to be validated through model tests of vehicle variants in summer 2019 and real scale tests of critical components. Underlying operational concepts, mission module designs as well as vehicle configurations for the tasks were validated by industry experts e.g. from Equinor and PGS. Exemplarily, we present two relevant missions; i.e. the exchange of subsea control modules (SCM) by the vehicle and the deployment and retrieval of ocean bottom seismic nodes.