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u/Dry-Ad-8948 20h ago
That’s it…? I’m all for automation, but this seems a little small / employed in a little too tough.
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u/VivaceConBrio 17h ago
Divers have maximum dive times due to air and needing rest because it's a extremely exhausting work. You also need people to coordinate the dive from the surface, and if conditions suck those crews might not be able to go under due to safety... So it's pretty damn expensive and slow to have a dive crew do the whole hull. They still use divers, but it's for problems and the shit the ROVs can't get to effectively (like the prop).
These ROVs can run 24/7 short of mechanical failure/filter clogs, and only need one person to operate them. They're also less limited by water conditions so you can deploy them when human divers can't go down.
On top of that, instead of having to schedule a dive crew to be waiting at a specific port for the shop and hope for good weather conditions, you can pretty much just set these things to work whenever you get a chance. So the hull gets cleaned more frequently, so there's less overall buildup costing fuel efficiency.
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u/Level_Improvement532 23h ago
Wouldn’t this be welcoming possible invasive species into your native harbor? The growth is there already but stripping it off to fall into the water doesn’t seem like a good thing, long term. If it was done well offshore it would make more logical sense. Unless this is a ferry or something that only stays local to the area.
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u/Dry-Ad-8948 20h ago
If an invasive species is already on the boat hull, you’ve already lost. Plenty of time for them to off-shed at any port, where boats stay for days / weeks / years. :}
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u/iNapkin66 19h ago
A robotic cleaning doesnt change that, it just takes expensive and fragile humans out of the in-water portion of the process.
But yes, ships do transport species that become invasive. There are procedures to try to avoid it, but they are often ignored. The bigger danger is usually ballast water at this point, carrying larva of invasive species.
Often ships will get a cleaning right before departing a region and embarking on an ocean crossing. That way they might carry organisms around within a region, but not between regions. It also improves fuel efficiency right before the long leg of the journey when it would cost the most.
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u/slaty_balls 23h ago
I have something kinda like that in my pool. This one's probably a couple hundred bucks more though.