Projects & products
Remote control retrofit
Adding wireless remote operation to equipment that was built to be manually operated without replacing serviceable plant.
A lot of working offshore equipment was designed to be operated manually, at close quarters. Health-and-safety expectations have moved on, operators working near moving loads is no longer acceptableReplacing serviceable plant to meet that is expensive and wasteful. Instead, we retrofit modern wireless walkaround control onto existing equipment: assess what’s there, integrate proportional control, sensing and safe-state behaviour and give the crew remote operation that gets them out of the danger zone.
How we approach it
- Assess the existing equipment – including its mechanical condition, hydraulic behaviour, load paths and operating constraints – so the retrofit fits the machine as it is.
- Integrate control without major modification – proportional valves, sensing and a wireless link added to the existing system, avoiding the cost, risk and hot-work licensing of a major rebuild wherever possible.
- Design the safety behaviour in – defined states for loss of signal, low battery and fault; the equipment fails safe and holds its load, with E-stop authority maintained.
- Maintainable on site – built so the people already on boardcan keep it running, without specialist control engineers flying out.
The result extends the working life and the operating envelope of plant that’s already proven, meeting modern HSE requirements without the downtime and cost of replacement.