Ship Hull Painting Robot: From Dry Dock Crews to ABB

A ship spends most of its working life with its hull underwater, and when it comes into dry dock the old coating has to be stripped and new paint sprayed on, usually by people working from lifts and staging. A ship hull painting robot does that job from a machine that travels along the hull. This post covers how hulls were protected and painted before robots, the painting rigs that drive along a hull in dry dock, the coating robots shipbuilders signed up for this year, and where ABB's paint robots, which mostly work in car factories today, could fit.

A NASSCO shipyard worker on a lift works on the hull of USS Bonhomme Richard in dry dock in San Diego, December 2010. Photo: U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Copper, paint pots and the first hull painting machines

In the mid-1700s shipbuilders nailed thin copper sheets to hulls to keep marine growth off, and about a century later they used Muntz metal the same way. Paint came next. Anti-fouling coatings were developed from 1840, Bonnington Chemical Works sold a copper sulphide paint around 1850, and by 1872 about 213 anti-fouling patents had been recorded. In 1847 the British Admiralty even considered limiting iron ships because of fouling, until a paint "with very fair results" turned up and the iron ships stayed in service. From the 1960s many commercial ships used tributyltin paints, which were later banned under an IMO convention.

The tanker Borgsten being painted shortly before her launch at J.L. Thompson and Sons' North Sands yard in Sunderland, October 1963. Photo: Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums via Wikimedia Commons (no known restrictions)

Preparing a hull for that paint took heavy hand work. Benjamin Chew Tilghman patented abrasive blasting on 18 October 1870, and Thomas Wesley Pangborn added compressed air in 1904, which gave yards a way to take hulls back to bare steel. Silica dust from sandblasting causes silicosis, and silica abrasive is not allowed in Germany, Belgium, Russia, Sweden and the United Kingdom. Spray painting with compressed air goes back to the Southern Pacific Railroad in the early 1880s, and modern airless guns work at 300 to 7,500 psi. In dry docks the painters still needed staging, access platforms and high-reach vehicles to get at the hull.

USS Nevada in Dry Dock Number 1 at Pearl Harbor around 1935, with men painting her boot topping from stages rigged over the side. Photo: U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

One answer was a rig that drives along the dock floor. In 2019 Hapag-Lloyd tested the Hull Treatment Carrier from the Austrian maker Palfinger on nine ships at yards in Hamburg, Marseilles and Singapore. Several automated units travel along the side of the hull, strip old paint with very high pressure water and spray new paint, each covering about 600 to 800 square metres an hour. Spraying exactly at right angles to the surface keeps overspray down. Shipyard staff still painted the bulbous bow, the area below the bilge keels, the propeller apertures and the flat bottom by hand. Hapag-Lloyd said the smoother finish lowered fuel use at the start and resisted fouling better over the full 60 months.

Dead marine organisms that grew under the hull of a wooden fishing boat, seen after it was hauled out at Morgat in Brittany, 2011. Photo: Lamiot / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Coating robots, climbing robots and ABB's paint shop arms

On 16 September Seapower reported that Raise Robotics, a San Francisco company whose wheeled robots with arms already work on high-rise building sites, is building fully autonomous coating robots for shipyards. Its chief technology officer said the company has eight-figure contracts and a co-development partnership with one of the largest shipbuilders in the world, expects to deploy robots across several yards next year, and plans to add bead blasting and hydro-blasting later. In August the US shipbuilder HII said it intends to award up to $900 million of work over seven years to Path Robotics and GrayMatter Robotics. GrayMatter's robots grind, blast and coat.

Workers from the Viktor Lenac shipyard in Rijeka, Croatia, apply red paint to the hull of USS Mount Whitney in October 2011. Photo: U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Kawasaki Heavy Industries is working on a robot that climbs the hull itself. On 6 October it showed a four-legged prototype, 60 by 44 by 29 cm, that holds on to steel with electromagnets and moves over vertical and curved surfaces. Its job is inspecting and welding seams, and painting is not on the list. Tests at Sakaide Works in Kagawa are planned for 2027, with practical use targeted for 2028. Kawasaki's president said the number of people working in Japan's shipbuilding industry keeps falling, and Maritime Executive noted that a robot like this would cut the need for high-reach equipment, staging and workers in dry dock.

USS Bremerton in Drydock Number 5 at Yokosuka, Japan, in July 1954, with men painting her hull. Photo: U.S. Navy via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

We found no ABB robot painting ship hulls, so this is a possibility. ABB's IRB 5500 paint robots work in car paint shops, where ABB says conventional spraying puts only 70 to 80 percent of the paint on the car body. Its PixelPaint head has more than 1,000 nozzles, rides on an IRB 5500, and uses 3D vision to print paint onto the body so that none is lost as overspray. Mercedes-Benz began using it at Sindelfingen in 2025. A hull is a far bigger surface than a car, but overspray is the same problem Palfinger tackled by spraying at right angles. Our post on paint robots from car bodies to walls covers other jobs these arms already do.

An ABB robot with a PixelPaint head prints a pattern onto a car panel at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Sindelfingen. Photo: ABB

Where hull painting robots go next

Raise Robotics wants one robot to handle coating, blasting and hydro-blasting, and HII's deal ties the robot makers' work to readiness and performance milestones, so the next few years should show whether these machines hold up in daily dock work. In Italy, Fincantieri said in October that its BOOST² programme for the shipyard of the future, worth almost €100 million, has involved more than 450 employees across 13 shipyards and is moving from experiments to rollout. For ABB, an arm like the IRB 5500 on a lift or a track along the dock wall is a possible fit, and its paths along a hull model could be planned in RobotStudio before the ship arrives.

Close view of the arm and paint head of an ABB IRB 5500 paint robot. Photo: ABB

Paint rules also reach leisure boats. Washington State has a law that may phase in a ban on copper anti-fouling coatings on recreational vessels from January 2018. Owners who keep a boat at home or in a marina are more likely to meet a robot that cleans the hull than one that paints it, as our post on hull cleaning robots shows. For commercial ships, a robot that sprays at a set distance and angle could also keep a record of where it sprayed and how much, something a crew with hand-held guns does not produce on its own.

Flakes of toxic anti-fouling paint left on the shore after a sailboat hull was stripped for repainting, on the Auray river in Brittany. Photo: F. Lamiot / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.5)

The hard corners are the first open problem. Even Palfinger's carriers left the bow, bilge keels, propeller apertures and flat bottom to people, and those are the places where a robot needs the most reach and sensing. Cost is the second: Raise Robotics describes its shipyard contracts as worth eight figures. Health risks remain too, since blasting can raise silica dust and lead particles from old paint. And someone has to program, clean and repair robots in a dock that is wet, dusty and full of solvent, which calls for skills that many yards are still building.

Two staff members beside the ABB PixelPaint robot cell at the Mercedes-Benz plant in Sindelfingen. Photo: ABB

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