Autonomous underwater manipulation from a floating I-AUV: The challenges of moving from the observation to the interaction with the underwater environment

Autonomous underwater manipulation from a floating I-AUV: The challenges of moving from the observation to the interaction with the underwater environment

Autonomous underwater vehicles are around for some time but their capabilities are still limited to the survey, monitoring and search tasks. The industry still relies on using heavy work-class remotely operated vehicles or specialised divers, when any interaction with the underwater infrastructure or environment is needed. Use of these kind of systems and humans involves extremely high costs and risks. This limits the possible applications to the highly profitable and emergency tasks. Therefore, our research group is working to extend the capabilities of autonomous underwater systems to enable underwater mobile manipulation without or with limited supervision of humans, using small, easily deployable robots, lowering the operational costs by several orders of magnitude and practically removing the need of sending humans to the hostile underwater environment. The lecture will focus on presenting possible practical applications of autonomous underwater mobile manipulation, discussing the involved challenges and ways to tackle them, and finally, showcasing the experimental works that have been completed at our laboratory.

Some of the works presented during the lecture are part of the EU Marine Robots project, funded by the European Community H2020 Programme, under the grant agreement no. 731103.