Abstract— The OceanRINGS is a set of components that should be installed on an ROV and inside the Control Cabin, in order to increase the level of automation, to make ROV operations easier and save expensive ship time by 20% or more. ROV LATIS is a next generation smart ROV, designed as a prototype platform to demonstrate OceanRINGS validity & operability and to prove smart technologies developed in the Mobile and Marine Robotics Research Centre, UL. Research outcomes are applicable to the growing international off-shore oil and gas sector, and also for future deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of ocean energy devices. System validation and technology demonstration was performed through a series of test trials with different support vessels off the west coast of Ireland. Selected results of the most recent field trials are presented in this paper. I. INTRODUCTION EPLOYMENT, installation & maintenance of ocean energy devices require use of underwater robots and support vessels, which are also used by other offshore industry, e.g. oil & gas. These vessels may be very expensive and, moreover, their costs are very volatile, depending on offshore peak demands. Thus, it is important to address the requirements for vessels to be used in ocean energy deployments and how these requirements may be configured to reduce the costs of these vessels and, simultaneously, affect technology development. According to Richard Vandervoort, chief of ROV operations & underwater robotics, Marine Institute, Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, “the only real automatic controls present on modern work-class ROVs, used in the offshore oil and gas Manuscript received January 18, 2012. This work has been supported by funding under the Irish Marine Institute and the Marine RTDI Measure, Productive Sector Operational Programme, National Development Plan 2000 – 2006 (PhD -05-004, INF-06-013 and IND-05- 03); Science Foundation Ireland under Grant Number 06/CP/E007 (Science Foundation Ireland - Charles Parsons Energy Research Awards 2006); HEA PRTLI 3 (MSR3.2 project -Deep Ocean Habitat Mapping using and ROV; HEA PRTLI 4 Environment & Climate Change Impacts and Responses Project/ Environment Graduate Programme; and Enterprise Ireland Commercialisation Fund Technology Development 2007 projects – MPPT Ring (CFTD/07/IT/313, "Multi-Purpose Platform Technologies for Subsea Operations) and PULSE RT (CFTD/07/323, "Precision Underwater Accelerated Sonar Emulation in Real Time) with ERDF funding. E. O. is with the Mobile & Marine Robotics Research Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland (phone: +353 61 202355; e-mail: edin.omerdic@ul.ie). D. T. is with the Mobile & Marine Robotics Research Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland (e-mail: daniel.toal@ul.ie). sector, are auto heading, auto depth and auto altitude. It really depends on pilot skills to do good piloting.” Challenges faced by ROV pilots during deep water operations include low visibility, time-varying ocean currents and umbilical drag effects, among others. The research team at the Mobile and Marine Robotics Research Centre (MMRRC), University of Limerick, has developed the OceanRINGS (previously known as MPPT Ring, [1]), a set of components that should be installed on an ROV and inside the Control Cabin, in order to increase the level of automation, to make ROV operations easier and save expensive ship time by 20% or more. Smart technologies developed under the OceanRINGS project are applicable to the growing international off-shore oil and gas sector, and also for future deployment, monitoring, and maintenance of ocean energy devices. In the period 2006 - 2011 the MMRRC developed a flexible multi-mode of operation survey class ROV LATIS (Fig. 1), which serves as a platform to test OceanRINGS validity and viability [2]. To date, the MMRRC team deployed the ROV LATIS from the RV Celtic Explorer & Celtic Voyager (Marine Institute, Galway) and Shannon One Multi-Cat (Shannon Port Company). Fig. 1. Smart ROV LATIS, prototype platform with built-in OceanRINGS smart technologies. The maritime sector offers a broad variety of applications for advanced computer graphics technology. Review of these applications, based on virtual/augmented reality, is given in [3]. Use of virtual reality in underwater tele- operation and training has been proposed in [4]. Recent advances in high-level simulators of underwater vehicles are described in [5]. The cost of operation & maintenance represents a significant share of the build up of overall offshore energy OceanRINGS: System Concept & Applications Edin Omerdic and Daniel Toal D