Development of unmanned inspection equipment for gravity type port structures

There are many old harbor facilities in Korea. They are exposed to external damages such as natural disasters, unexpected impacts and so on. These damages can lead the structural function degrade of their facilities. These problems can be overcome by continuous inspection and maintenance. Land side of port structures is executed inspection and maintenance easily with various developed equipment already. On the other hand, submerged side of them is inspected by divers generally. Harbor facilities are so huge structures generally, it is spent long time to inspect entire them. Therefore, continuous underwater inspection with long time is very hard work to divers. Also, the equipments for underwater inspection have not been so much development. To prevent these problems, an underwater inspection is being developed at Korea Institute of Ocean Science & Technology (KIOST) in Korea. Using this machine, the inspection and maintenance of gravity type port structures can be executed continuously with low cost. In this paper, the specification and the concept of the equipment are introduced. Then, mobility mechanism, underwater positioning, underwater camera part are as following. Using the captured images which are reflected their location by underwater camera, entire images of inspected harbor facilities can be produced. By the result of the research, it will be expected to increase the effectiveness of underwater inspection of the harbor facilities and the safety related to underwater work.