The U.S. Navy’s Office of Naval Research (Arlington, Virginia, USA) recently awarded a two-year contract to Greensea Systems (Richmond, Vermont, USA) to continue in the building of an autonomous robotic system used to proactively clean ship hulls. This is a continuation of the work that Greensea has been conducting through a U.S. Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) program since 2018.
While the first phase of the contract was focused on designing the system, this second phase is focused on refining the navigation and technology’s autonomy. The objective is to create a system that is easily operated, cost effective, and requires minimal supervision.
To achieve the goals of phase two, Greensea has partnered with the University of Maryland’s Environmental Resource Center (MERC) (Solomons, Maryland, USA) and Armach Robotics, a sister company of Greensea. MERC brings significant expertise in biofouling control methods and will provide critical support in independent, scientific assessments of the robots’ navigation, autonomy and cleaning technologies. Meanwhile, Armach will supply the robots and robot operators to conduct field operations throughout the period of performance.
As part of the research, Greensea will continue to focus on the navigation and autonomy refinement.
“The Navy is investigating this technology as a means to keep ships clear of biofouling in an environmentally sustainable way, ensuring fleet readiness and ultimately reducing hull related maintenance costs,” says Karl Lander, director of regulatory compliance and outreach at Armach.
A final requirement of any STTR program is to demonstrate the technology’s commercial viability, along with demonstrating its value to the Navy. To achieve this, Greensea is developing a novel, hull-relative positioning system for use in a hull-crawling robot designed and built by Armach Robotics.
Using a combination of inertial and feature based sonar navigation, the robot will be capable of determining and continually updating its position on the ship’s hull with extreme accuracy, allowing Greensea’s autonomy capabilities to free the operator from driving the robot.
Source: Greensea Systems, www.greensea.com.