Autonomous hull maintenance crawler for cleaning, hydro-jetting, hydro-blasting and vacuum blasting.

The repetitive and labour-intensive nature of many maintenance activities during the refit of ships/ submarines creates an ideal scenario for capability augmentation by the introduction of automation and robotics. The challenge is to make a remotely operable crawler capable of attaching to the ship’s hull onto which respective modules/ attachments for hull cleaning, hydro-jetting, hydro-blasting and vacuum blasting can be affixed for undertaking associated dry-dock maintenance activities. This will greatly reduce the labour-intensive nature of dry dock works (viz, scaffolding, rigging of heavy-duty equipment in dry dock etc.) while ensuring saving in time and enhancing safety of personnel in dry dock. Hull cleaning, hydro-jetting, hydro-blasting, hull survey, and painting are repetitive activities undertaken during the dry dock phase of ship/submarine maintenance. These activities are repetitive in nature, labour-intensive and are traditionally undertaken manually using scaffoldings and other COTs equipment.