Abstract
The hydro blasting of metallic surfaces is an essential maintenance task in various industrial sites. Its requirement of a considerable labour force and time, calls for automating the hydro blasting jobs through mobile robots. A hydro blasting robot should be able to cover the required area for a successful implementation. If a conventional robot footprint is chosen, the blasting may become inefficient, even though the concerned area is completely covered. In this work, the blasting arm’s sweeping angle is chosen as the robot’s footprint for hydro blasting task, and a multi-objective optimization-based framework is proposed to compute the optimal sweeping arc. The genetic algorithm (GA) methodology is exploited to compute the optimal footprint, which minimizes the blasting time and energy simultaneously. Multiple numerical simulations are performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Moreover, the strategy is successfully implemented on our hydro blasting robot named Hornbill, and the efficacy of the proposed approach is validated through experimental trials.
Highlights
In recent times, the ship hull maintenance has become a prominent area of interest in robotics
This paper aims to bridge this gap in the area coverage planning for hydro blasting robots
Two coverage strategies named as Line Sweep and Stop Sweep are proposed for two types of hydro-blasting robot Hornbill
Summary
The ship hull maintenance has become a prominent area of interest in robotics. Ship hull maintenance is one of the key marine sector activities that thrive on automation technologies. Cleaning of a ship hull that is infested with tightly sticking barnacles (Biofouling) requires high-pressure washing [1,2]. Ship hull cleaning and hull biofouling management using hydro-blasting are often considered unsafe and time consuming task in the marine industry. Automated robotic solutions for ship-hull hydro-blasting are inevitable for productivity enhancement and ensuring a safe working environment for human workers. We can observe evidence for a significant research effort to develop robotic solution for ship-hull hydro-blasting. Zheng et al proposed a semi-automatic robotic solution to ease the manual ship-hull cleaning [7]. Milella et al proposed ship-hull inspection method using robot that is equipped with magnetic tracks which aids the robot in climbing and a monocular camera for the inspection purposes [8]
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