Tag Archives: MINOAS

Home is the robot, home from the sea

A Mar. 26, 2013 news item on Nanowerk features a robotics project designed for inspecting cargo vessels (Note: A link has been remvoed),

For huge cargo vessels that carry millions of litres of oil, thousands of shipping containers, or tens of thousands of tonnes of coal or steel, safety is paramount. These ships must comply with rising safety standards that require time-consuming inspections by surveyors, who in turn risk their own safety by climbing inside massive cargo areas and on scaffolding constructed around ships.

To help save time and money, and improve the accuracy and quality of these important inspections, an EU-funded research project has developed a fleet of remote-controlled robots that crawl through cargo ships in search of cracks, corrosion and other defects.

Equipped with robotic arms, cameras and magnetic wheels, the robots roll up and down the high, steep walls of ships, looking for defects on the massive steel plates and measuring their thickness with ultrasound. Controlled from a central station using virtual reality techniques, the robots crawl throughout the ship – taking pictures, videos and measurements without the need for human inspectors to go inside the hold or climb up scaffolding.

The project , known as MINOAS (Marine INspection rObotic Assistant System), holds the potential to make ships safer while also extending their life at sea.

The European Commission website (http://ec.europa.eu/research/transport/projects/items/minoas-maintenance-robots_en.htm) features this explanatory video,

Here’s more from the European Commission ‘MINOAS news’ page,

Among the four models of MINOAS robots is the “Magnet Crawler”, a two-wheeled, battery-powered device with a miniature video camera, two motors and a handle-shaped elastic tail. Weighing less than a kilogram, it climbs walls at a half-metre per second and transmits videos and images to human inspectors carrying hand-held receivers.

In a demonstration of their teamwork, the robots can conduct inspections in pairs – the first using a brush to clear away rust and dirt so that the second robot can use its ultrasonic device to measure the thickness of the wall. The robots’ advanced locomotion abilities enable them to operate in every compartment of ships.

The robots offer other advantages over human inspectors. “With the robots, we expect to obtain more data – quicker,” said Grasso [Alessandro Grasso of the Italian classification society RINA], whose organisation is charged with, among other responsibilities, certifying the safety and environmental worthiness of ships. “By having more detailed data, we can make more accurate comparisons with previous inspections, to see if there have been any changes that need to be addressed.”

This last point carries extra importance. By closely monitoring cracks, weak spots and other types of deterioration over time, ship owners will better be able to estimate future damage and the costs to repair it.

Grasso said MINOAS has received great interest at technology expos, and the project team expects the robots to reach the commercial market in the foreseeable future.

There is also a MINOAS website here.

For interested parties, the headline is a paraphrase of a line from a Robert Louis Stevenson poem. Interestingly, the original line is often misquoted according to the Wikipedia essay on Stevenson,

Stevenson had always wanted his ‘Requiem’ inscribed on his tomb:

Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.
This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.

However, the piece is misquoted in many places, including his tomb:

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,
And the hunter home from the hill.