Design of a Semi-Automatic Robotic System for Ship Hull Surface Blasting

Blasting and painting operations involve high consumption of materials such as blasting grits and paint. In Singapore, most of the ship hull cleaning and blasting process are manual operations in the shipyard environment. The shipyard workers need to use fork lifts or cherry pickers, which cause several problems such as low efficiency, harmful pollution to operators' health, and inconsistent blasting quality. In order to improve blasting efficiency, this paper proposes a new design for enclosed blasting chamber mechanism to mimic the manual movements of the blasting guns. To replace the manual blasting operations and increase the efficiency, this mechanism realizes automatic motion control of blasting guns and integrates three blasting guns. A prototype blasting chamber is fabricated for testing experiments. This research is jointly conducted with our industry partner.