Remote Inspection Techniques: A Review of Autonomous Robotic Inspection for Marine Vessels

Due to the harsh environment and heavy use that modern marine vessels are subjected to, they are required to undergo periodic inspections to determine their current condition. The use of autonomous remote inspection systems can alleviate some of the dangers and shortcomings associated with manual inspection. While there has been research on the use of robotic platforms, none of the works in the literature evaluates the current state-of-the-art with respect to the specifications of the classification societies, who are the most important stakeholders among the end users. The aim of this article is to provide an overview of the existing literature and evaluate the works individually in collaboration with classification societies. The papers included in this review are either directly developed for, or have properties potentially transferable to, the marine vessel inspection process. To structure the review, an expertise-engineering separation is proposed based on the contributions of the individual paper. This separation shows which part of the inspection process has received the most attention, as well as where the shortcomings of each approach lay. The findings in this review indicate that while there are promising approaches, according to our metrics there is still a gap between the classification societies’ requirements and the state-of-the-art. Our results indicate that, even though there is a lot of quality work in the literature, there is a lack of integrated development activities that achieve a level of completeness sufficient for the classification societies to confidently use them.