Ship hull inspection using a swarm of autonomous underwater robots: a Search algorithm

Emergency ship hull repair is a vital damage control procedure that makes the difference between reaching the next port and losing a ship. For repairs to be made, ship hull breaches must be quickly located and patched. In this paper, we propose a searching algorithm to be used by a homogeneous swarm of autonomous underwater robots to inspect a ship hull and identify breaches. Inspired by methods tested in 2D environments, we combine aspects of previous studies and implement them in a 3D environment. We compare two approaches designed to achieve complete area coverage of a large section of ship hull and identify the approach that yields the shortest discovery time and highest accuracy. Our system is verified within the Webots software simulated environment and shows that the system is resilient to sensor noise and failure of a fraction of the robot population.