Why hasn't anyone made a robot to clean our boat bottoms?

[DakineRobotics]

Hey everyone! My name is Lyle and I've been sailing for 5 years now. Two years on a Catalina 22 and 3 years on a Catalina 30, all in the SF Bay Area. Like most of you I'm sure, I've always been frustrated with the bio-fouling maintenance owning a boat that is kept in the water requires. Having a service take care of it for me is too expensive to justify, and doing it myself is exhausting. After years of dealing with this headache, I'm exploring whether there might be a better solution. I have a graduate degree in robotics and mechatronics system and worked in robotics integration for 10 years. After doing some research, it looks like there are quite a few startup companies that have made some robotic hull cleaning devices but none have mass produced them and using robotics to clean hulls has not caught on in popularity from what I have seen.

Before I go any further with this idea I'd love to hear from fellow boaters about your experiences and pain points with hull cleaning. What's your current approach? Would you be interested in a pool cleaner/Roomba like device for cleaning your boat hull? I'm most curious about the different perspectives across boat types, regions, and maintenance philosophies. Drop a comment below to let me know what you think or take the short survey (Link) I created in an effort to gather feedback from boat owners.

Fair winds! -Lyle

 

[Foswick]

Hi, and welcome.

I've spent some brain time on this idea and believe there is a decent market opportunity. (Though we don't think it is in the recreational space.) We've looked at this and came to the conclusion that the engineering challenges were too great, so moved onto lower hanging fruit. It sounds like you came to a different conclusion. I hope you've solved some issues that we gave up on.

To answer your questions:

We haul out once a year and clean and optionally bottom paint at that time. In our area, that is adequate. We get a thin layer of slime if the boat sits for a few months, which we sometimes clean with a brush on an extension, as far as we can reach. Simply moving the boat on a regular basis seems to keep the bottom clean, provided we clean annually and keep up on bottom paint.

Every once in a while, when anchored out, one of us takes a dive to give the prop a bit of a scrub, as that is really the only surface that gives us any problems with growth.

If we needed an interim cleaning, we would just hire a diver for a couple hundred bucks. But, we never do.

In our area, many people have those curved poles - most of them made out of PVC pipe - and are pretty adept at using them. Takes about 10-15 minutes, I think, maybe once a month at most.

If we lived in an area where growth was more aggressive, I would consider paying for a routine service that uses such a solution, but I would never own it myself - pretty much at any cost. And, I would pay around $100/mo for that service.

 

[sailme88]

They have and they are available.. Look very similar to a pool bot...google it !