hull crawler bot

[volmer]

Hi,

A uni friend and I are looking to develop a product and start a business; one of our ideas was a small hull/shaft cleaning and inspection robot. Like everything, after a quick google search we found that this wasn’t really a revolutionary new idea. I thought this might be a good place to ask if anyone has experience using these types of things? How was your experience? Was there anything you felt was missing or could be improved? If you have not used one, do you think there is any value to one and feel there is a space in the market for another?

Any views and advice would be most appreciated.

Kind Regards

 

[jac]

Welcome to the forum and good luck with your project.

Personally not used or seen one but might be interested but see the points below before you get too enamoured of the reply!

In terms of cleaning - I would concentrate on cleaning the hull, rather than the shaft. The Hull provides the biggest area of course and is a simple shape. Cleaning that well gives the biggest benefit therefore. Cleaning the shaft / prop could be a very tricky challenge and not worth sacrificing hull cleaning ability - sound like a great engineering challenge though.

IN terms of the business side - I would suspect you are onto a very tricky subject to make it commercially viable. Some key facts to consider:
You can lump sailors into 2 very broad categories - Racers / sailors keen on speed and secondly - those unconcerned by speed. I suspect this second group is much larger than the first

The second group are unlikely to use / buy your gear. They will come out of the water once a year to clean the hull, repaint with antifoul and change anodes etc. They know the benefit o an extra knot but don't do anything to deliver it.

The first group are your target market and you will need to compete against the existing ways of doing this. AT present, the keen sailor may be able to clean the hull by:
Diver - potentially free if you are the diver and it doesn't need scuba gear. Takes no real time
Drying out on piles - potentially free / low cost ( £20 IIRC on the Hamble) takes 12 hours and lots of waiting round and depends on boat being suitable to take the piles.
"dry dock" type operation where the boat I lifted and scrubbed. Only a couple in operation in the UK I think - maybe £150 - £200 and takes an hour or two
Lift and pressure wash - Available at all marinas. Similar cost to the above - can be done when the owner is away as the yard will do all the work.
Dry sailing - boat only launched for the race and then recovered so never gets weed etc growing.

Also bear in mind that even these boats will come out of the water for proper maintenance at least once a year so the underwater clean may only be 2 or 3 times a year thing.

The top, professional boats will have the boat in and out whenever and the lift costs are such a small amount of the budget that your saving will be negligible part of the budget.

For this group you will need to be able to remove as much of the growth as a pressure wash / hand scraper can. If it leaves weed on the bottom then it's not doing the job that the owner wants and they won't re-use.

SO in reality you will need to be able to compete on price and provide a guaranteed total clean. That would probably mean the owner breaking even in two years - say 4 scrubs max.

Finally - you will need to be fairly certain that you meet environmental regulations. These restrict the amount of run off into the water that scrubbing allows. Developing an underwater robot that removes the weed but doesn't disperse removed anti-fouling into the water will be a real challenge.

 

[A1Sailor]

What a good post jac.:encouragement:

 

[jac]

What a good post jac.:encouragement:

Thank you kind sir.

Yours was an excellent example of positivity in the online world!

 

[Ingwe]

I would agree with everything that Jac has said and would put the idea on the back burner for now with one caveat - it is probably only a matter of time before a country bans the use of toxic anti-foul which would force all the cruising boats to also use teflon / silicon based anti-fouls that racers currently use and require scrubbing the hull more frequently......

 

[volmer]

Thank you very much for your well thought out and in depth response. More than I could have hoped for, thank you very much.

 

[roblpm]

Ok so i will buy something like an automatic hoover. After racing we attach it to the side of the hull. It then crawls the hull cleaning it. And when finished returns to the original spot.

Not sure how it attaches to grp?!

And needs to be quite small to get into all the nooks and crannies!!

 

[Quandary]

It is likely to be an expensive product so may be to be purchased by specialist operators who would offer a service, individual boat owners are not likely to invest more than a few hundred on something like this. But then the marinas where the service is needed may want to promote their own lift and scrub services, these use equipment that is already in place, available and underused in summer when weed growth is strongest.
Unless this is a purely theoretical exercise consideration to providing and marketing the product would deserve early study.

 

[Pagetslady]

I know that there is a hull scrubber in Granville France, its rather like a car wash, it seems as if you take the boat in between the uprights there are roller brushes on each side which I imagine scrub the bottom moving from bow to stern. I have never seen it used but I think it the racing fleet down there will use it, perhaps they don't use anti foul hence no pollution in the marina.
Mike

 

[stephen_h]

There is a French made remote robot that will clean your hull. Operated from the
boat or alongside pontoon. It is used a lot on mega yachts where lifting out
is very expensive. such as South of France.
Looked at it as a possible buisness but very expensive to buy and difficult
to beat the competition on price!