On 19th of February Our PhD student Luke FitzGerald successfully defended his thesis titled “Dynamic Underwater Target Inspection: A Real-Time Motion Correction Approach for 3D Scanning”.
This thesis describes research work carried out in the domain of underwater robotics, aimed towards improving the efficiency and performance of underwater target inspection tasks. Remotely operated vehicles equipped with various remote sensing hardware are widely used in the offshore industry for subsea inspection. Due to the particularly expensive and time-consuming nature of offshore operations, it is of great value to increase the efficiency of these inspection tasks. Generally, this is performed on static rigid targets such as fixed offshore energy infrastructure or shipwrecks. In recent years, with the developments and surging interest in floating offshore wind, as well as the desire to improve the ease of access for ship repairs, there has been an increasing need for suitable inspection methods. This thesis includes a presentation and analysis of novel operations showcasing the viability of inspection and repair of damaged ship hull structures in water. Additionally, due to the dynamic motion of targets such as floating offshore wind infrastructure and ships at sea, significant distortion is an issue when scanning with sonar or laser systems using standard operation procedures. The work presented in this thesis addresses this issue. The outlined approach and results show a working implementation of a system that uses a camera to track the motion of the target and compensates in real time to produce an undistorted 3D laser point cloud of the target. This thesis presents work that has been successfully tested with different types of remotely operated vehicles in a variety of scenarios, ranging from controlled water tanks to at sea environments.
Congratulations to Luke and his supervisors Prof Daniel Toal, and Dr Phillipe Cardoso Santos their guidance and support throughout this journey! Wishing Luke all the best as he embarks on his future career path!
