Ship Hull Inspection Using a Swarm of Autonomous Underwater Robots: A Search Algorithm

Abstract

Emergency ship hull repair is a vital damage control procedure that makes the difference between reaching the next port and losing a ship. For repairs to be made, ship hull breaches must be quickly located and patched. In this paper, we propose a searching algorithm to be used by a homogeneous swarm of autonomous underwater robots to inspect a ship hull and identify breaches. Inspired by methods tested in 2D environments, we combine aspects of previous studies and implement them in a 3D environment. We compare two approaches designed to achieve complete area coverage of a large section of ship hull and identify the approach that yields the shortest discovery time and highest accuracy. Our system is verified within the Webots software <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">i</sup> simulated environment and shows that the system is resilient to sensor noise and failure of a fraction of the robot population.