Cooperative Robotics - Technology for Future Underwater Cleaning

This paper reports the description of the different types of robotic platforms currently employed in hull cleaning and ship inspection tasks, related to maintenance and classification operations. The functional requirements of the specific applications and characteristics of the different class of vehicles are presented and compared. The paper also reports the main trends in marine and maritime robotic research, with innovation transfer towards naval industry and real applications. In particular, the paper focuses on cooperative robotics bringing new ideas and concept to improve the performance, quality and safeness related to ship cleaning and inspection.