Abstract
The maintenance of ship hulls involves a series of routine tasks during dry-docking that renews its life-time and operating efficiency. One such task is hull inspection, which is always seen as harmful for human operators and a time-consuming task. The shipping maintenance industries started using the robotic solutions in order to reduce the human risk. However, most of such robotic systems cannot operate fully autonomously due to the fact that it requires humans in the loop. On the other hand, an autonomous hull inspection robot, called Sparrow, is presented in this paper. The proposed robot is capable of navigating autonomously on the vertical metal surface and it could perform metal thickness inspection. This article summarizes the robot’s mechanical design, system control, autonomy, and the inspection module. We evaluated the robot’s performance by conducting experimental trials on three different metal plates that varied in thickness. The results indicate that the presented robot achieves significantly better locomotion while climbing, and it can autonomously measure the metal thickness, which significantly reduces the human efforts in real-time.
Highlights
The shipping industry is one of the oldest industries that acts as a backbone of global trade and economy
For the horizontal slippage test, the robot is set to 20% of its maximum speed and it is placed on the centre of the sheet
The thickness measurement trials were started by placing the metal plate vertically and attaching the robot on the same
Summary
The shipping industry is one of the oldest industries that acts as a backbone of global trade and economy. Over 53,000 merchant ships conduct international trade with an economic value of 1.3 trillion USD, which includes general cargo, oil tankers, chemical tankers, passengers, and liquefied natural gas [1]. All such ships must undergo a series of routine repair tasks while docking in a shipyard in order to maintain a smooth and foul free operation. Inspection tasks are always seen as highly labor intense, and hazardous to human operators when accessing constrained narrow spaces Ship owners diverted their interest in using robotic solutions in order to reduce the amount of risk and drawbacks in the manual inspection process, which eventually opened a new market for robotics products. After witnessing the market demand, various aspects of ship hull inspection robots, including mechanism design, human interaction, and autonomy, have been researched in depth over the last two decades
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