Autonomous Diesel-engine Maintenance, Inspection, Repair, And Logistics

A major part of the Navy’s modernization priorities is the development of new uncrewed surface vessels (USV). These uncrewed vessels are expected to operate autonomously for extended periods of time without any crew for long-distance missions. The Navy has long relied on marine diesel engines for powering its surface vessels, particularly main propulsion diesel engines (MDPEs). A limiting factor to this operational goal is the necessary repair and maintenance routines required to keep marine diesel engines running. While missions could be shortened to limit runtime (facilitating maintenance and repairs by crew when docked), the Navy envisions robotic solutions onboard to inspect, maintain, and repair these engines and other critical systems during long-duration missions, performing both preventative and continuous maintenance actions to eliminate the need for human presence. However, bandwidth and latency limitations in operational areas are expected to often preclude remote teleoperation, requiring these robotic systems to heavily utilize autonomy and intelligence. To enable autonomous behaviors, improvements in several areas are needed, including mobility, perception, and cognition. To address this, TRACLabs and IHMC propose the ADMIRAL (Autonomous Diesel-engine Maintenance, Inspection, Repair, And Logistics) effort to develop a robot-agnostic framework facilitating autonomous inspection, maintenance, and repair of MDPE systems. The proposed effort will initially target technologies to enable autonomous inspection/change detection capabilities, while providing a framework into which additional capabilities can be incorporated as they mature.