The objective of the European project BugWright2 is to develop and demonstrate an adaptable autonomous robotic solution for servicing ship outer hulls.
By combining the capabilities of autonomous micro air vehicles and small autonomous underwater vehicles, with teams of magnetic-wheeled crawlers operating directly on the surface of the structure, the inspection and cleaning system will be able to seamlessly merge the acquisition of a global overview of the structure with performing a detailed multi-robot visual and acoustic inspection of the structure, detecting corrosion patches or cleaning the surface as necessary – all of this with minimal user intervention. The detailed information provided will be integrated into a real-time visualization and decision-support user-interface taking advantage of virtual reality technologies.
Although ships are the targeted application, the technology may be adapted to different structures assembled out of metal plates, and in particular to storage tanks, our secondary application domain.
Role of Lakeside Labs
Within the consortium of 21 research and industry partners, Lakeside Labs is responsible to develop and implement concepts from the self-organization domain to real robotic swarm applications.
More specifically, we want to answer the following research questions:
- What are the main advantages of swarms in this context?
- How we can enrich the multi-robot approach with swarms?
- What kind of coverage algorithms can be used?
- How to perform inter- and intra-swarm communications?
- How to integrate this into a heterogeneous application?
Funding
European Horizon 2020, Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), Robotics in Application Areas (ICT-09-2019-2020)
Project Coordination
Prof. Dr. Cédric Pradalier
National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS, France)
Georgia Institute of Technology Lorraine
Partners
| CNRS, France | Le Centre national de la recherche scientifique |
| CETIM, France | Technical Centre for the Mechanical Industry |
| UPORTO, Portugal | Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto |
| UIB, Spain | Universitat de les Illes Balears |
| INSA, France | National Institute of Applied Science |
| RWTH, Germany | RWTH Aachen University |
| TRU, Germany | Trier University |
| UNI-KLU, Austria | Universitaet Klagenfurt |
| NTNU, Norway | Norwegian University of Science and Technology |
| WMU, Sweden | World Maritime University |
| LAKE, Austria | Lakeside Labs GmbH |
| RBP, France | Roboplanet |
| BEYE, Norway | Blueye Robotics AS |
| RINA, Italy | Registro Italiano Navale |
| GLM, Greece | Glafcos Marine Ltd. |
| APDL, Portugal | Administração dos Portos do Douro, Leixões e Viana do Castelo |
| AASA, Portugal | Arsenal do Alfeite |
| IEIC, France | In Extenso Innovation Croissance |
| DANAOS, Cyprus | Danaos Shipping Co. Ltd. |
| SBK, Cyprus | Starbulk Shipmanagement Co. Ltd. |
