Robotic inspection of ship structures: how to fill the gap between available technologies and current survey practices?

–Adoption of Robotics and Autonomous Systems (RAS) in activities related to ship inspections has obvious potential advantages, but also shows some problems, ranging from ship-RAS interface to regulatory and legal viewpoints. The ROBINS project (ROBotics technology for INspection of Ships) is a collaborative project cofunded within the H2020 EU Research and Innovation programme call, aimed at filling the gap between current ship inspection requirements and available robotic technology. The present work aims at highlighting how human-made ship inspections can be improved using RAS, with equivalent results of the current practice, which indeed is rather satisfactory. In such a framework, a Testing Facility (TF) has been built up and it is still under development. Hence, the features of the TF where RAS will be tested and the testing protocols during trials are presented, showing how technological and regulatory gaps can be filled. Basically, RAS target will be to carry out inspections at the same quality level of humans’ ones.