Innovative design of an underwater cleaning robot with a two arm manipulator for hull cleaning

The fouling is a major problem that occurs to the ship's hull. This phenomenon causes severe economic and ecological consequences of shipping activities. Therefore, several robotic solutions were developed to mitigate fouling problem and to robotize hull-cleaning process. However, the existing solutions are either slow remotely operated vehicles or fast - but non-transportable - cleaning station equipped with manipulator's arms. In this paper, we aim to combine the transportability of the remotely operated vehicle solution and the cleaning efficiency offered by the use of arm manipulators. Hence, we present an innovative design of an underwater ship hull-cleaning robot called ARMROV by attaching two-manipulator arms to a remotely operated vehicle. However, in this new design, the robot central part is subject to dynamic stability issues during the cleaning operation that are caused by coupling forces between arms and the central part. In order to evaluate perturbations on the center part of the ARMROV, the kinematic and the dynamic model of the manipulator's arms were developed performed using Khalil-Kleffinger and Newton-Euler methods respectively. The dynamic stability during the hull cleaning operation was studied and checked using dynamic equivalence approach. Simulations results proved the efficiency of the stability approach and the feasibility of the proposed solution. In conclusion, the suggested design represents a promising stable and efficient solution for hull underwater cleaning.