Frankenstein Goes Swimming: Software Architecture of a Modified BlueROV2 Heavy for Underwater Inspection and Maintenance

Inspecting and maintaining large man-made underwater structures, like piles of wind turbines in the open sea, has long been a job performed by professional divers. With the aim of reducing both the hazards to the divers and the costs that come with such missions, efforts have been made to develop remotely operated underwater maintenance robots that can undertake these missions in the future. One such robot that has recently been developed by the Fraunhofer research group Smart Ocean Technologies in Germany is introduced in this paper. An existing BlueROV2 Heavy from Blue Robotics was modified by adding a crawling skid underneath the robot, to which either a linear unit for anti-corrosion coating or a reading device for ultrasonic fatigue crack detection could be attached. While the project presented interesting challenges in both hardware and software integration, this paper focuses on the software architecture of the modified robot and its periphery.