Underactuated Unmanned Surface Vessel Coverage Path Planning for Marine Pier Inspection
Yu Hin Ng, Yujie Hou, Yixing Yuan, Ching Wei Chang · 2024
Inspection for maritime infrastructures like piers is essential since they suffer from prolonged moisture penetration and corrosion of seawater especially their base part near water surface. This may threaten their structural integrity and pose risk to the public users. However, limited space and densely-packed pilings underneath the infrastructure raise difficulties in both manual inspection and data collection using unmanned aerial vehicles. Unmanned surface vessel (USV) is thus a more suitable mobile platform for data acquisition in this scenario. Safety issues arise due to the underactuation of conventional USV upon the presence of densely-packed obstacles. We thus propose a novel coverage path planning method to make the USV capable of scanning the inspection region with the onboard camera safely and efficiently with a simple hardware upgrade. Simulation experiments are performed to validate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. The advantages of this approach in other potential applications are also discussed.