euronews innovation – Robot ship inspectors

www.euronews.com The maintenance of seafaring ships can be a laborious and costly expense. The damp and dirty inspections which take many man hours must be done at regular intervals to ensure their sea worthiness. This normally involves taking the huge vessels to dock in poor countries where labour cost are lower, but a team of boffins have thought up and started testing a project which should help save time and money for this task. Leonidas Drikos, the managing director of the project explains: “The project is about inspecting ships with the assistance of robots. We implemented a fleet of robots, different kinds of robots, that will altogether undertake the task.” The steel hold of a cargo ship in Bulgaria is quite literally crawling with robot inspectors. Each one takes a slightly different approach to the job of making sure a ship is seaworthy; a magnetic climbing robot is used for inspecting ship hulls, an underwater robot inspects ballast tanks, an autonomous flying vehicle makes a visual inspection and a fourth robot with magnetic tracks is used to inspect the hold of a ship. Whether they’re flying, crawling, or depth-scanning, the robots are designed to scrutinise the ship from every angle. The aim is to offer a flow of accurate information to surveyors, and thereby cut time and costs. Alessia Vergine is head of Marine Research at “RINA”:www.rina.org She says “We obtain general video that gives us an idea of the decay or integrity of the structure, and the …
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