US Navy turns to hull-climbing bots to combat maintenance backlog Never mind seals, the US Navy is turning to geckos to improve its ship inspection capabilities. Much like their amphibiously named comrades, these robots are geckos in name – and wall-climbing capabilities – only. The bots come from Gecko Robotics, which said last week it had reached a deal with the Navy to supply it with the …
My old man said that most items he witnessed being sabotaged had their maintenance backlogs automatically zeroed out with a "nah it's fine, don't do maintenance" until the system broke. The humans in the loop never picked it up because the thresholds, for example, contaminated oil, were raised to lethal levels.
Equally, pipelines exploded when thickness thresolds were zeroed. The bot doing the inspection had the triggers saying "nah, less than 1 mm is fiiiine" and the whole thing went up.
So yeah, use bots, but be sure they can't be hacked to say "10 milimeters' when the measurement device says in actuality "one milimeter". Both calibration and interpretation are subject to tampering.
basically we still need human "supervision" along with high security.
Having been in a Navy shipyard involving drydocks a few times, there are a LOT of people doing these kinds of tasks - welding, painting, visual inspections, x-ray the hull, etc.
Robots would help a LOT. But of course people need to supervise them.
Of my little lesbian lizards - aka Mourning Geckos - this should be interesting. Especially when someone puts guns on it (they will) or gives them an AI, or both.
Still at least these ones won't show up on my ceiling at 3am chirruping at me because they got out of the viv and now they're hungry... Catching them is an acquired skill.. But the talking is cute, the thinking they can eat fingers is even cuter.
I just hope they don't go all "short circuit" on people after a thunderstorm..
You're years behind, that was my last job.
Autonomous underwater robot, launched from an autonomous boat, armed with shaped charges and/or an underwater shotgun. Intended for clearance of underwater explosives.
One of the reasons I left was the push from very tightly specified targeting to a more general target-identification system that made me very, very nervous.
The technology needed for this is skilled-hobbyist level.
In the commercial world it would be pretty trivial to go from that to a hunt-down-and-destroy security killbot that can distinguish between divers/boats/aquatic life.
These things are built and programmed to find and report on one (maybe two or three[0]) potential problems, whereas actual people going over the hull will notice (and hopefully report) all kinds of other problems.
A[so, WTF does the vessel have to be in drydock for these things to work? Shirley if drydock time is an issue, the robotic survey could be done at anchor pretty much anywhere. Unless the company isn't up to making their toys waterproof ...
[0] Hull thickness, paint thickness, perhaps primer thickness.
These use magnets, on account of most* ship hulls being made of steel.
So yes, they absolutely would work for inspection in port. Probably not while under way, but port time is really cheap compared to drydock.
I'm also pretty sure these have been used for years, not entirely sure what's new.
* Minehunters need not apply. Splash.
I can't help wondering how much setup time is required to customize each robot for Frigate type A sub class B deck 5. Probably makes sense on the bigger ships and the more consistent items (I'm thinking outer hull) but when you have 500 different ships it is probably quicker and easier to get a cheap guy checking the deck than an expensive programmer programming to analyse this type x landing craft
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