Waterjet Vision System

Cleaning is a critical preparation step for repair work. Water jetting has become a common choice for coating removal due to its comparatively low reduction of substrate material. However, continued support of aging systems has resulted in cleaning jobs becoming bespoke due to the for low frequency and high variation between cleaning subjects. A cleaning pass may cover the entirety of the surface, but due to non-uniform wear, tear, and repair there are commonly small spots of coating that often remain. To remove those spots for complete cleaning, the current normal is to run the entire cleaning process or at significant sections. This extends the overall cleaning process time by needing humans to identify and rerun cleaning jobs are that are not efficient at spot removal. Oceanit proposes an automated solution that can be applied to existing waterjet depots using an IoT-architecture for connectivity. This utilizes minimal footprint vision component addons that  attaches to water jetting armature and produces video streams for analysis. The views from the addons are streamed to an external processing unit for sensor fusion and machine vision is used to identify and report residual coating. Optimized modifications to the cleaning program are provided for the rework loop to efficiently reduce necessary time and avoid substrate material loss from unnecessary exposure to already cleaned surfaces being exposed to additional water jetting.