Uploaded May 2023 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
This video presents results on autonomous exploration of multiple ballast water tank compartments inside an FPSO vessel. The autonomous mission necessitated the traversal of several manholes with dimensions as narrow as 0.7 by 0.5 meters. To execute the mission, the robot performs simultaneous localization and mapping, represents the world using voxels thus allowing it to conduct volumetric calculations, plans exploratory paths within each compartment, and detects and localizes the manholes within them. Detection of manholes takes place on point cloud data and is necessary since due to their constrained size, autonomous traversal across them merely by means of sampling paths in the volumetric map is unlikely. The robot subsequently utilizes such detections to automatically traverse across compartments. Overall, in this mission, the aerial robot explored six ballast tank compartments and returned back to its original take-off location.
This video presents results on autonomous exploration of multiple ballast water tank compartments inside an FPSO vessel. The autonomous mission necessitated the traversal of several manholes with dimensions as narrow as 0.7 by 0.5 meters. To execute the mission, the robot performs simultaneous localization and mapping, represents the world using voxels thus allowing it to conduct volumetric calculations, plans exploratory paths within each compartment, and detects and localizes the manholes within them. Detection of manholes takes place on point cloud data and is necessary since due to their constrained size, autonomous traversal across them merely by means of sampling paths in the volumetric map is unlikely. The robot subsequently utilizes such detections to automatically traverse across compartments. Overall, in this mission, the aerial robot explored six ballast tank compartments and returned back to its original take-off location.
