Development of Ship Hull Cleaning Underwater Robot

The sea transportation by ships covers most of trade volume, and the technologies for fuel efficiency and reductions of carbon-dioxide emissions should be developed. One of the technical issues to improve fuel efficiency of ships is how to prevent the marine biofouling to the ship hulls and remove organisms from ships. In general, the cleaning of ship hull is carried out on the ship inspection in dock yard or by divers in harbor. Frequent cleaning of ship walls is desirable to keep good fuel efficiency, however, the ship inspection on dock is done once a year and the cleaning by divers is high-cost and involve high risk. One of the solutions to the problem is the introduction of underwater robots to clean ship surfaces. In this paper, an underwater robot for ship hull cleaning is proposed and examined through ship hull cleaning experiments.