SANDBLASTING old paint off ships in dry dock creates heaps of toxic flecks
and grit. A new robot that employs jets of water to strip hulls down to bare
metal could be far more environmentally friendly.
The robot has magnetic wheels that grip the hull as it rolls along,
stripping the paint with ultra-high-pressure jets of water. The used
water is sucked back through a hose. Unlike the sand used by sandblasters, water
can be recycled, while the old paint is filtered out and stored in a drum.
“It’s an environmental nightmare to be sandblasting with grit. To strip a big
ship you literally have to create a mountain of debris,” says Mickey Donn,
director of communications for UltraStrip Systems. The Florida-based company
created the robot with help from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Carnegie
Mellon University’s Robotics Engineering Consortium.
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The robot is connected by a tube to a pump and vacuum system in a truck. At
the moment, an operator controls the robot remotely with a joystick. The
challenge, says Bill Ross, a roboticist at Carnegie Mellon, is to make the robot
completely independent by equipping it with video cameras and sensors so that it
can find its own way along the hull.
The cameras will allow it to follow the lines of stripped paint back and
forth across the hull. Sensors will gauge the thickness of the paint and
determine how slowly the robot has to go to remove it. Donn predicts a large
market for the robot, as new environmental regulations force shipowners to
remove toxic paint and replace it with less damaging alternatives.