This paper presents a solution for the autonomous exploration and inspection of Ballast Water Tanks (BWTs) of marine vessels using aerial robots. Ballast tank compartments are critical for a vessel's safety and correspond to confined environments often connected through particularly narrow manholes. The method enables their volumetric exploration combined with visual inspection subject to constraints regarding the viewing distance from a surface. We present evaluation studies in simulation, in a mission consisting of 18 BWT compartments, and in 3 field experiments inside real vessels. The data from one of the experiments is also post-processed to generate semantically-segmented meshes of inspection-important geometries. Geometric models can be associated with onboard camera images for detailed and intuitive analysis.
@article{arxiv.2311.03838,
title = {Autonomous Exploration and General Visual Inspection of Ship Ballast Water Tanks using Aerial Robots},
author = {Mihir Dharmadhikari and Paolo De Petris and Mihir Kulkarni and Nikhil Khedekar and Huan Nguyen and Arnt Erik Stene and Eivind Sjøvold and Kristian Solheim and Bente Gussiaas and Kostas Alexis},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2311.03838},
year = {2023}
}
Comments
8 pages, 7 figures, accepted for publication at the 2023 IEEE International Conference on Advanced Robotics (ICAR)