Periodic Reporting for period 2 - BugWright2 (Autonomous Robotic Inspection and Maintenance on Ship Hulls and Storage Tanks)
Reporting period: 2021-04-01 to 2022-09-30
Nowadays, outer hull service/inspection and maintenance is mostly done at dry dock, either manually or with a Remote Automated System. In this condition, complete hull-thickness measurements by discrete sampling account for 5-8 days of work (source: AASA). Similarly, hull cleaning is done at quay but typically requires 8 days of down time corresponding to a loss of 100 to 200 k€. With its latest available technology, Roboplanet evaluates that the servicing of a 280m ship with three Remote Automated Systems would take about 10 hours and require 6 to 7 trained employees to operate all the platforms. Nevertheless, the robustness and reliability of Autonomous Robotic Systems has not yet been demonstrated enough to convince owners and end-users of their full potential in cost and time savings.
That is why a future where teams of robots would be inspecting or cleaning the hull while the ship is at quay, in the harbour, loading its new cargo is our goal. Verifying the ship structural soundness and cleaning its hull would cost minimal downtime if any, leading to safer ships and even improved competitiveness. Cleaner ship hulls would also result in 5% to 10% (30% in extreme cases) reduction in fuel consumption, which roughly corresponds to saving half a swimming pool of heavy fuel per return trip across the Atlantic. This would have obvious impact on the transport competitiveness and on the environment (marine pollution) if generalized across all the fleet, and in particular to the 18 000 vessels larger than 25 000 tons. Just in this category, savings of the order of a 30 000 swimming pools of fuel per year could be considered.
BugWright2’s objective is to tackle this issue.
The goal of BugWright2 is to achieve scientific and technical excellence by going beyond the current state of the art regarding the inspection of large structures with a heterogeneous team of robots operating on and around the inspected hull, in and above the water. A key ambition of BugWright2’s is to build an experimental commercial inspection and cleaning service, offered at three European sites. This service will be a large-scale demonstrator allowing end-users to get acquainted with robotic inspection technologies, and allowing R&D teams to expose their step changes in technological readiness through demonstration on real deployments. BugWright2 focuses on unlocking the potential of the robotic ship hull inspection market, to provide high-quality visual and acoustic inspection of these structures or to provide an autonomous cleaning service. And in the aim to make infrastructure and industries more sustainable and respectful of the environment.
That is why a future where teams of robots would be inspecting or cleaning the hull while the ship is at quay, in the harbour, loading its new cargo is our goal. Verifying the ship structural soundness and cleaning its hull would cost minimal downtime if any, leading to safer ships and even improved competitiveness. Cleaner ship hulls would also result in 5% to 10% (30% in extreme cases) reduction in fuel consumption, which roughly corresponds to saving half a swimming pool of heavy fuel per return trip across the Atlantic. This would have obvious impact on the transport competitiveness and on the environment (marine pollution) if generalized across all the fleet, and in particular to the 18 000 vessels larger than 25 000 tons. Just in this category, savings of the order of a 30 000 swimming pools of fuel per year could be considered.
BugWright2’s objective is to tackle this issue.
The goal of BugWright2 is to achieve scientific and technical excellence by going beyond the current state of the art regarding the inspection of large structures with a heterogeneous team of robots operating on and around the inspected hull, in and above the water. A key ambition of BugWright2’s is to build an experimental commercial inspection and cleaning service, offered at three European sites. This service will be a large-scale demonstrator allowing end-users to get acquainted with robotic inspection technologies, and allowing R&D teams to expose their step changes in technological readiness through demonstration on real deployments. BugWright2 focuses on unlocking the potential of the robotic ship hull inspection market, to provide high-quality visual and acoustic inspection of these structures or to provide an autonomous cleaning service. And in the aim to make infrastructure and industries more sustainable and respectful of the environment.
During the course of the RP2 a lot of progress have been made on the autonomy of the different platforms. Localization and autonomous navigation are available and has been demonstrated on the aerial crawler, the drones and the underwater platform. With respect to MS3 to 8, the technical objectives have been reached but the transfer to the end-users is still a work in progress and a challenge. The underwater crawler has accumulated a lot of delay and is just being delivered to UPorto at the beginning at RP3. In parallel, a significant effort has been done in the direction of the user interfaces, the acoustic data processing as well as the understanding of the legal and sociological challenges. To support integration, 3 integration weeks have been conducted, a large-scale (12m) mock-up representing a section of a bulk carrier has been built in Perama (GLM, Greece) and used in the integration weeks, and a smaller hull section has been built to test acoustic technologies (CETIM, France). Sub-team integration involving multiple partners have also been conducted on storage tanks in France and on ferries in Norway and Austria.
In RP3, a strong push towards the autonomy of the underwater crawler is expected, building on the foundation work on the aerial crawler and the underwater ROVs. Transfer of the technologies to the end-users and platform provider is also expected to be a strong activity in RP3. Multi-robot and augmented reality integration will also be a key technical challenge, complexified by the need to have a common localisation frame and all the platforms operating in a common time frame. 3 integration weeks are planned to support these technical development.
In RP3, a strong push towards the autonomy of the underwater crawler is expected, building on the foundation work on the aerial crawler and the underwater ROVs. Transfer of the technologies to the end-users and platform provider is also expected to be a strong activity in RP3. Multi-robot and augmented reality integration will also be a key technical challenge, complexified by the need to have a common localisation frame and all the platforms operating in a common time frame. 3 integration weeks are planned to support these technical development.
BugWright2 intends to go beyond the state of the art on the topic of autonomous navigation for inspection crawlers, interpretation of ultrasonic inspection data, autonomous aerial and underwater visual inspection, heterogeneous multi-robot mission planning and immersive 3D user interfaces for large scale system monitoring. All these innovations, combined together, will support the implementation of a large-scale pilot that will demonstrate to end-users that robotic operations on a vessel hull are valuable and efficient.
BugWrigh2 partners are also working on developing a regulatory and policy blueprint. It will facilitates the use of autonomous robotics to the task of visual inspection and hull cleaning with a view to enhance climate change mitigation benefits derived from cleaner hulls. The blueprint will also look to the future by exploring labour law and market considerations as a result of the automation of traditional shipyard-tasks. This will contribute to making the European research and development industry world leading and highly competitive for robotics technology.
So far, discussions are underway between some partners in order to develop new services or technologies.
In this second reporting period, the progress beyond the state of the art have been spanning multiple dimensions. In WP1, many contributions have been made regarding the legal and socio-economic context. In WP2, all the platforms have seen multiple innovations that are supporting or will support new products. In WP3, we published a number of papers linking acoustics and robotics in a new way. In WP4 and WP5, many contributions have been made related to the localisation, mapping and the autonomy of the robotic platforms. In WP6, a new algorithm for multi-agent coverage and inspection has been presented to a major conference. Finally, in WP7 and WP8, the user interface design, including end-users’ feedback and psychology insight is taking shape.
At the industrial level, beyond the new product developed in WP2, partner GLM has been pushing hard to get new services, involving robotic assets, approved by class societies and tested in the field. The innovation is a major push with respect to the state of the art.
In parallel, IEIC has launched a series of meeting to identify the project valorisation potential and perform a market study that will be updated for the end of the project.
BugWrigh2 partners are also working on developing a regulatory and policy blueprint. It will facilitates the use of autonomous robotics to the task of visual inspection and hull cleaning with a view to enhance climate change mitigation benefits derived from cleaner hulls. The blueprint will also look to the future by exploring labour law and market considerations as a result of the automation of traditional shipyard-tasks. This will contribute to making the European research and development industry world leading and highly competitive for robotics technology.
So far, discussions are underway between some partners in order to develop new services or technologies.
In this second reporting period, the progress beyond the state of the art have been spanning multiple dimensions. In WP1, many contributions have been made regarding the legal and socio-economic context. In WP2, all the platforms have seen multiple innovations that are supporting or will support new products. In WP3, we published a number of papers linking acoustics and robotics in a new way. In WP4 and WP5, many contributions have been made related to the localisation, mapping and the autonomy of the robotic platforms. In WP6, a new algorithm for multi-agent coverage and inspection has been presented to a major conference. Finally, in WP7 and WP8, the user interface design, including end-users’ feedback and psychology insight is taking shape.
At the industrial level, beyond the new product developed in WP2, partner GLM has been pushing hard to get new services, involving robotic assets, approved by class societies and tested in the field. The innovation is a major push with respect to the state of the art.
In parallel, IEIC has launched a series of meeting to identify the project valorisation potential and perform a market study that will be updated for the end of the project.