Ship Hull Repair Using A Swarm Of Autonomous Underwater Robots: A Self-Assembly Algorithm

HAIRE, Matthew, XU, Xu, ALBOUL, Lyuba, PENDERS, Jacques and ZHANG, Hongwei (2019). Ship Hull Repair Using A Swarm Of Autonomous Underwater Robots: A Self-Assembly Algorithm. In: 2019 European Conference on Mobile Robots (ECMR). IEEE.

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Abstract

When ships suffer hull damage at sea, quick and effective repairs are vital. In these scenarios where even minutes make a substantial difference, repair crews need every edge they can get. In this paper, we propose a self-assembly algorithm to be used by a homogeneous swarm of autonomous underwater robots to aggregate at the hull breach and use their bodies to form a patch of appropriate size to cover the hole. Our approach is inspired by existing modular robot technologies and techniques, which are used to justify the feasibility of the proposed system presented in this paper. We test the ability of the agents to form a patch for various breach sizes and location and investigate the effect of varying population density. The system is verified within the two-dimensional Netlogo simulation environment and shows how the system performance can be quantified in relation to the sizes of the breach and the swarm. The methodology and simulation results illustrate that the swarm robot approach presented in this paper forms an important contribution in the emergency ship hull repair scenario and compares much advantageously against the traditional shoring methods. We conclude by suggesting how the approach may be extended to a three-dime

Item Type:	Book Section
Additional Information:	“© 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works.”
Identification Number:	https://doi.org/10.1109/ECMR.2019.8870910
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Elements
Depositing User:	Symplectic Elements
Date Deposited:	23 Sep 2019 10:24
Last Modified:	18 Mar 2021 03:24
URI:	https://shura.shu.ac.uk/id/eprint/25169

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