Illustration of the BugWright2 project

BUGWRIGHT2 is a H2020 European project, started in January 2020, completed in March 2024, coordinated by Prof. Cédric Pradalier.

The project website, designed and maintained by L. Monnier, has been archived here. The original URL was www.bugwright2.eu.

The objective of BUGWRIGHT2 is to bridge the gap between the current and desired capabilities of ship inspection and service robots by developing and demonstrating an adaptable autonomous robotic solution for servicing ship outer hulls. By combining the survey capabilities of autonomous Micro Air Vehicles (MAV) and small Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV), with teams of magnetic-wheeled crawlers operating directly on the surface of the structure, the project inspection and cleaning system will be able to seamlessly merge the acquisition of a global overview of the structure with performing a detailed multi-robot visual and acoustic inspection of the structure, detecting corrosion patches or cleaning the surface as necessary – all of this with minimal user intervention.

The detailed information provided will be integrated into a real-time visualization and decision-support user-interface taking advantage of virtual reality technologies. Although ships are the targeted application, BUGWRIGHT2 technology may be easily adapted to different structures assembled out of metal plates, and in particular to storage tanks, our secondary application domain.

The project consists of a large consortium bringing together not only the technological knowledge from academia but the complete value chain of the inspection robotic market: two SMEs, one class society to evaluate the use of these technologies in the certification processes, a marine service provider and two harbors to provide access to ships, one shipyard to deploy the system within a maintenance framework and two ship-owners. In addition, specialists in maritime laws and workplace psychologists will ensure that the digitalisation of this market sector is designed around user acceptance. Finally, a specialist in innovation will lead the dissemination and exploitation activities.

Videos

Presentation of BugWright2 and one of its Integration weeks (Athens, Greece, May 2022). The first physical and on-site Integration week was at the Perama shipyard in Athens (Greece). After a couple of years forced to work remotely, partners were finally happy to do their tests on site. For this occasion, a mock-up was built and tests were realised on the hull (use of a Crawler), around the hull (drones) and in the tank around the hull (Pioneer). In the same time, the first studies about work psychology were realised, the mapping of the hull and the draft of the Virtual Reality environment started. Congratulations to all partners for the amazing work done!

Crawler integration demo: CNRS working on localisation and mapping on a RBP crawler.

Visualisation integration demo: RWTH working on a VR/AR-supported hardware and software framework that enables efficient and intuitive planning and monitoring of inspection and cleaning tasks in a multi-robot scenario.

Pioneer integration demo: Blueye test an acoustic position system.

Crawler demo: CNRS working on Ultrasonic Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping.

Crawler demo: CNRS working on autonomous sweeping of a steel wall.

Crawler demo: CNRS working on localisation and mapping.

Visualisation integration demo: VR application developed at RWTH and the drone located at UNI-KLU.

Drone demo: illustration of autonomous inspection-oriented capabilities of the UIB drone.

Drone demo: performance of the UIB 3D laser-based odometer

Drone demo: Motion estimation results from the VIO solution developed at the University of Klagenfurt (UNI-KLU), processing flight data captured at the UIB laboratory.

Drone demo: Illustration of the performance of an RGBD-based odometer developed at the UIB lab.

Pioneer demo: Autonomous underwater operation (Pioneer) realised by BEYE. Visualisation by RWTH.

UIB GitHub page

Drone demo: Autonomous sweeping, mock-up rear part by UIB (Integration week Perama, Athens, Greece, May 2022).

Drone demo: Autonomous vertical inspection on the mock-up rear part by UIB (Integration week Perama, Athens, Greece, May 2022).

Drone demo: Autonomous sweeping & vertical inspection on an offshore platform by UIB (Integration week Trondheim, Norway, June 2022)

Drone demo: Autonomous sweeping in sequence at the biology station by UIB (Integration week Trondheim, Norway, June 2022).

Defect and obstacles localization: work on the development of a robotized solution for localization and mapping for inspecting of large-scale structures by CETIM.

Defect localisation with a single Robot: CETIM has developed an innovative robotic solution dedicated to the inspection of boat hulls and other large structures such as storage tanks.