NORWEGIAN tech firm ECOsubsea has launched a next-generation hull cleaning robot it says can clean a ship 10 times faster than traditional divers.

It has tested the two-tonne, eight-metre ‘Panther 10X’ in Singapore since August and hopes to clean more ships that bunker there, saving their owners the cost of longer cleaning stops.

“We cleaned a fully laden capesize vessel with an 18 metre draft in just four hours,” ECOsubsea chief executive Tor Ostervold said.

Ostervold said the robot captured about 253kg of biofouling for safe disposal instead of releasing it into the sea. It is also far gentler on paintwork, allowing more regular hull cleaning.

Scrubbing biofouling from ships cuts drag, saving fuel. Today most of it is done by divers using handheld equipment, who often die in accidents. Divers cannot work in more than one knot of current, while their quality of work varies, and safety risks increase the longer and deeper they stay submerged, Ostervold said.

It could take 40 hours for divers to clean a capesize in Singapore, but just 12 hours to bunker one, meaning the ship could lose two days to cleaning.

Ostervold and his brother Klaus founded ECOsubsea in 2008, and have cleaned about 1,000 vessels with the earlier Panther 2X robot. They hope to build 30 of the Panther 10X remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to serve ships in ports around the world.

Tor Ostervold said the extra speed was possible through 16 years of optimising nozzle and vacuum technology, the sheer size of the equipment, and using AI for navigation to clean ships faster.

“It’s a massive machine… it’s also a very much simpler machine than we have had previously,” Ostervold said.

The Oslo-headquartered company has tested the robots on ships belonging to Grimaldi Group, Wilhelmsen, Carnival and Royal Caribbean.

A service typically costs $10,000-$15,000, about the same as other cleaning methods; the benefit is the speed. Its soft jets remove about 3.5 microns off the hull surface, about a twentieth of the amount removed by high-pressure cleaning, protecting anti-fouling coatings.

“The theory is that that will enable shipowners to clean much more often,” Ostervold said.

Bigger ships would see bigger efficiency gains, but the robot could also clean smaller ships. The smallest it had cleaned in Singapore was 120 metres long, Ostervold said. “It makes more sense to have it from 100-400 metres. And actually the bigger the merrier.”

Ostervold said he heard concerns about robots replacing divers, but added: “It’s just going to replace part of the dangerous work for the diver.”

The company worked with divers on 90% of jobs, cleaning the bottom and sides of the hull while divers would handle other sides, propeller polishing and niche areas, he said.

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