First steps towards a roboticized visual inspection system for vessels

Vessel maintenance entails periodic visual inspections of internal and external parts of the vessel hull in order to detect the typical defective situations affecting metallic structures, such as cracks, corrosion, etc. This paper presents the first steps towards a roboticized visual inspection system aiming at automating as much as possible the whole inspection process currently undertaken by human surveyors. Occurrence of defects are first outlined, followed by a brief description of the whole system. Next, details for one of the robotic platforms to be used are given, as well as for the image processing algorithms dealing with the visual detection of defects.