Design and Modeling of WL-I Vehicle for Ship Hull Cleaning

During the long service life of a ship, the surface of the ship hull will be attached to a large number of marine creatures. This will slow down the ship’s navigation speed, increase fuel consumption, and even endanger the safety of the ship’s structure. This unique and challenging problem can be solved by using underwater cleaning robots. In this paper, the remote-operated underwater vehicle system named WL-I is introduced, which can complete the inspection of the adhesion of marine creatures on the ship hull and clean them off. The WL-I has two operation modes: free-flying in the water and crawling on the ship hull. In the second mode, the adherence to the ship hull is guaranteed by applying a force normal to the hull surface from the vertical thrusters, and the forward driving force is provided by the horizontal thrusters at the rear for its locomotion on the hull surface.