Accurate and fast geometry acquisition and data evaluation of ship surfaces for efficient coating processes - FINISH

Seven of the ten longest private yachts were built in Germany. In order to maintain the pioneering economic position, the efficiency of the coating process of luxury yachts is being investigated in the project FINISH funded by the Federal Ministry of Economic Affairs and Energy.

The shell of the yacht consists mainly of welded metal plates. Accordingly, the surfaces are thermally warped, dents are present, welding seams are visible, etc. In order to compensate for these undesirable deformations, a complex filling process takes place which results in a smooth and "aesthetic" surface. This filling process can take up to twelve months and is characterized by many manual steps.

In order to increase the planning and reproducibility of the process and increase the efficiency, a kinematic terrestrial laser scanning system (k-TLS) is used in this project to investigate the data acquisition of the actual state. In addition, the automated cleansing of the resulting point cloud is an important goal. The IFW is investigating how an optimized target model can be created based on the point cloud. In a first step, aesthetic criteria are determined and converted into mathematical descriptions. In order to create the optimized target model, existing design data of the yacht are used and approximated to the point cloud. This ensures that the previously determined aesthetic criteria are met. Afterwards, a filler map is created from the automatically generated target model, which gives technicians the required filling height. The whole process reduces the process time by up to 30%.