SBIR Phase I: Autonomous and permanently deployed ship hull inspection and cleaning vehicle

The broader impact/commercial potential of this Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project is to improve efficiency in the shipping industry. Biofouling, or surface contamination on ships, increases drag and consequently makes travel inefficient. This project will develop an underwater robotic system that performs automated ship hull inspections and cleaning, increasing fuel efficiency by 10 percent and subsequently saving a container vessel $2 million annually.

An automated cleaning solution improves safety and minimizes expensive human labor. The proposed innovation will maintain hull and coating performance; furthermore it will generate high-resolution images that can lead to improvements in coating design, as well as expensive and time-consuming dry-dock procedures. Beyond ship hull cleaning, automated cleaning technology has broad applications in vertical industrial inspection automation and military use.

This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I project will develop an autonomous and permanently deployed ship hull inspection and cleaning vehicle. This Phase 1 project will develop a low-cost sensor architecture and localization algorithm that can reliably place the vehicle on the hull. To date, there has been progress on large human-deployable robotic cleaning vehicles that can be an alternative to diver operations.

However, these vehicles must be used at or close to a port, have complex filtration systems, are expensive and difficult to deploy, and require trained operators. During Phase I project, an autonomous magnetic crawling vehicle with a minimum cleaning speed of 0.25 m/s will be developed to test sensors for this application. Sensors identified as complementary and reliable will be integrated to position the vehicle on the hull using a probabilistic estimator.

To ensure the vehicle optimizes its energy usage when submerged in a high drag environment, a key metric of success will be to accurately position the vehicle within 3 meters on the ship hull 95 percent of the time to minimize cleaning coverage overlap.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.