Hornbill: A Self-Evaluating Hydro-Blasting Reconfigurable Robot for Ship Hull Maintenance

Maintenance of ship hull involves routine tasks during dry-docking that includes inspection, paint stripping, and re-painting. Among those, paint stripping is always seen as harmful for human operators and a time-consuming task. To reduce human risk, cost, and environmental cleanliness, the shipping maintenance industries started using robotic solutions. However, most of such robotic systems cannot operate fully autonomous since it requires human in the loop to monitor the cleaning efficiency. To this end, a novel autonomous self-evaluating hull cleaning robot called Hornbill is presented in this paper. The proposed robot is capable of navigating autonomously on the hull surface and perform water jet blasting to strip off the paint coating. The robot is also enabled with a Deep Convolutional Neural Network (DCNN) based self-evaluating scheme that benchmarks cleaning efficiency. We evaluated the proposed robot’s performance by conducting experimental trials on a metal plate under three different paint coatings. While performing the paint stripping task in every experimental trial, the self-evaluating scheme would generate the heat map that depicts the plate’s cleanliness. The results indicate that the proposed self-evaluating system could successfully generate high accurate cleanliness heat maps in all considered scenarios, which simplifies the checkup process for paint inspectors.