Autonomous Hull Grooming Vehicle

The objective of this proposed effort is to develop a highly autonomous hull-grooming system that can be operated easily and cost-effectively with minimal supervision. This system will meet the rigorous standards of current manned-grooming operations using a rotating brush tool and will ensure complete coverage of the groomed area by providing on-hull positioning accuracy of 0.15m. We will develop this system initially for use on DDG-51 class destroyers as well as both Freedom and Independence-variant Littoral Combat Ships though due to the tremendous commercial potential for such a capability, we will also design for multi-purpose ship grooming use. Building on the significant developments already realized for on-hull underwater vehicles, vehicle-to-hull attachment methods, tooling, and grooming methodologies, our research will focus on providing an accurate navigation, control, and operations scheme to these existing capabilities. Our proposed technical approach is based on the development of a multi-modal aided Inertial Navigation System (INS) specifically for hull-relative orientation, localization, and navigation combined with a proven autonomous control architecture for miniature water-borne robots and an intuitive mission-planning, quality assurance, and visualization Human Machine Interface (HMI) for supervising the hull grooming robot.