Thermal forming automation system for curved hull plates in shipbuilding: analysis and design

Abstract

Forming a curved plate is an essential process for building a ship. The process is currently performed manually, which is a critical bottleneck in shipbuilding. Therefore, there is a need to automate the process. In this paper, a novel process is proposed for automating the manual process. The current manual process is analysed to identify properties necessary for automation, and technical approaches for automation are presented. The proposed process consists of measurement, shape evaluation and forming, which constructs a loop that produces a curved plate iteratively. The correctness and convergence of the process are verified.