MINOAS

MINOAS — Marine INspection rObotic Assistant System

Project type: European research project

Period: 2009 - 2012

Focus Area: MINOAS is a new system concept that aims in formulating an integrated product that will be straightforwardly applied to the inspection related procedures of the maritime industry. This system concept does not only lie in the implementation of existing technology to a new application field, but in creating a new environment for the human personnel related to these tasks. The data acquisition tasks (DAQ) will be automated, through the incorporation of a semi-autonomously operating robot fleet. This withdraws the human personnel from the hazardous environment of a vessel under inspection, and avoids the need for temporary staging in large compartments. To guide the surveyors final outcome/decision on the vessel's overall structural condition, there exists an entire DAQ related methodology since UTM operators acquire structural thickness measurements from a predefined (or on-line moderated) grid of locations over the vessel's hull. Surveyors will be "teleported" to this environment using virtual reality and stereographic vision, which allows them review and extract results without the psychological pressure of actually working within a non-friendly environment. The immediate results on the quality of the inspection procedures achieved by ensuring that the psychological factors affecting the human inspectors are minimized will be further leveraged by the quality of the gathered data. The methodology so far followed for the harvesting of the required measurements will be revisited when considering the new tools at hand. MINOAS is a new system concept that aims in being distilled into a new & innovative product that will act more like a decision support system in the aid of the human inspector, rather than a standalone system (without a human in the loop). It aims in facilitating the inspection process by a) providing ease of access on over & under water regions of a vessel through the incorporation of a multi disciplinary robot fleet, b) commutating the gathered data to a central collection point, c) providing additional software tools for the on-line elaboration of the assembled information and d) recording of the overall process that will provide the opportunity for future reference, including the opportunity to point out deficiencies in the process followed.

Improving marine vessel inspection by introducing autonomous inspection technologies and by automizing the overall inspection process.

The increasing competitiveness in marine operations creates a need for new system concepts that introduce high technology value added products, facilitate the processes involved and minimize the downtimes. The need, thus, lies not only in incorporating the technological means so far available, but in changing the way the corresponding authorities stand against the challenges at hand.

MINOAS project proposes reengineering of the overall vessel-inspection methodology, by introducing an innovative system concept that incorporates state of the art technologies, but at the same time formulates a new standardization of the overall inspection process. Through holistic approach, MINOAS proposes the development of a new infrastructure that substitutes human personnel by high locomotion enabled robots and “teleports” the human inspector from the vessel’s hold to a control room with virtual reality properties. The human’s perceptual abilities are enhanced through the utilization of high resolution tools (eg. sensors) and are augmented through the parallel processing property provided by MINOAS. Following the centralized control scheme adopted in similar distributed control methodologies (SCADA), the number and the sequence of the tasks required is rearranged and the overall inspection procedure is brought in alignment with the current tendency adopted in similar inspection, exploration and surveillance tasks.

The proposed innovative system concept, considers the assembly of a robot fleet with advanced locomotion abilities and sets of tools that are dedicated to the tasks attached to the inspection process, the development of control techniques and algorithms that provide a semi-autonomous nature to the operation of the robot-fleet and a hierarchical controller that realize the virtual environment for the human inspector and adds newly developed toolboxes enabling on-line processing of the harvested data and operate as a Decision Support System in the aid of the inspector.

Project Leader

Alberto Ortiz Rodriguez

Alberto Ortiz Rodriguez

Project Collaborators

Related Publications