Ship Bottom Inspection Using Water-Air Integrated Drone
- KDDI Smart Drone Corporation, Prodrone Corporation, and Kunimori Corporation were selected for the Cabinet Office National Ocean Policy Promotion Secretariat's "Autonomous Unmanned Vehicle (AUV) Utilization Demonstration Project" and conducted a demonstration experiment of ship bottom inspection in Hyogo Prefecture.
The water-air combined drone is a combination of an aerial drone and an underwater drone, and is the world's first (Note 1) drone that can fly in the sky and dive into the water by remote control using radio waves in the sky (4G LTE). The acoustic positioning device allows the drone's position information to be obtained even underwater where the Global Positioning System (GPS) cannot be used.
In this demonstration, the Kobe University training ship "Kaijinmaru" was inspected and photographed using a combined water and air drone. During the underwater photography, inspection points on the bottom of the ship were photographed, and it was confirmed that the drone can efficiently inspect areas such as the propeller area, which are difficult to approach with normal underwater drones.
Through this initiative, by taking photographs using remote, autonomous drones and analyzing them with AI, we aim to establish rules for bottom inspection work in order to improve the efficiency and standardize the overall work, reduce dangerous work, and commercialize it.
(Note 1) This is the world's first drone that combines an aerial drone and an underwater drone and can fly in the sky and dive into water by remote control via radio waves in the sky (4G LTE). It was developed on May 31, 2021 by KDDI Smart Drone Corporation, KDDI Research, Inc., and Prodrone Inc.
Source: KDDI Smart Drone
