Not long ago, I was talking to a professional diver and he was explaining how difficult it is to do underwater inspections, welding, and other preventive maintenance. Indeed, I have a little bit of experience in underwater boat hull cleaning myself, and no, it’s not easy at all. Perhaps the most difficult thing is using a soft bristled brush on a fiberglass hull while underwater. Every time you push the brush forward, it pushes you back, you are exerting very little pressure on the actual hull therefore you aren’t doing very much cleaning for all of the energy expenditure.
It seems there has to be a better way, and we should be using underwater robotic to handle this cleaning for us. After all, it costs money to rent scuba tanks or doing underwater cleaning by way of snorkeling – that becomes challenging too. Human have to breathe and it just makes the job even tougher. Okay so, how might you go about creating an underwater unmanned vehicle, or a fully autonomous unit to do in-water boat hull cleaning?
Well, perhaps we might take this underwater robotic concept described here; “Design of a Small, Cheap UUV for Under-Ship Inspection and Salvage,” by David P. Miller and modify it using my strategy for boat hull cleaning. I propose we use a robotic system which looks very much like a little tractor. The treads would have suction cups on them, and to ensure they stuck onto the hull as it was driving across and cleaning the surface, little air bubbles would be blown into each suction cup as it moved.
The suction cups would be peeled away as the tread was bent around the spindle on the ends, just as a gecko hand peels its suction cups away as it climbs vertical surfaces. This small robotic tractor would obviously be cleaning upside down as it went across the bottom of the boat hull. And there would be an antenna sticking off the top, which would then be the bottom of the robotic unit which would be used to communicate with the operator in the case of an ROV (remotely operated vehicle) type hull cleaning machine. In this case an antenna would be lowered over the side of the boat into the water for line of sight communication.
In the event of a more sophisticated autonomous underwater vehicle or AUV, the system would work very similar to that of a robotic lawnmower as it mows the grass. In fact, we wouldn’t need to develop very many new technologies to make all this work. These robotic systems and software already exist. Please consider all this and think on it.
