Development and Navigation of a Mobile Robot for Floating Production Storage and Offloading Ship Hull Inspection

This paper describes the current development status of a mobile robot designed to inspect the outer surface of large oil ship hulls and floating production storage and offloading platforms. These vessels require a detailed inspection program, using several nondestructive testing techniques. A robotic crawler designed to perform such inspections is presented here. Locomotion over the hull is provided through magnetic tracks, and the system is controlled by two networked PCs and a set of custom hardware devices to drive motors, video cameras, ultrasound, inertial platform, and other devices. Navigation algorithm uses an extended-Kalman-filter (EKF) sensor-fusion formulation, integrating odometry and inertial sensors. It was shown that the inertial navigation errors can be decreased by selecting appropriate Q and R matrices in the EKF formulation.