Let’s shrink it: Hydrobatic Underwater Robots for Confined Spaces
Confined aquatic environments range from rivers and marinas to constrained industry basins such as nuclear storage ponds.These scenarios pose challenging yet promising tasks to be performed by underwater robotic systems including manipulation and sampling as well as exploration and monitoring of spatial environmental fields, e.g. performed by robot teams. The cluttered and confined nature of these scenarios demands for a new class of underwater robotic platforms that is small-scale, low-cost, and possesses agile – hydrobatic – maneuvering capabilities, a list of features that calls for taking inspiration from an aerial sibling: drones.
Despite the recent progress, guidance, navigation, and control are widely unsolved for agile micro underwater robots.
This talk aims to provide an overview of the recent progress and open challenges in this field. We will focus on three bottleneck topics within micro underwater robotic research: suitable low-cost robot designs, self-localization methods for confined underwater environments, and algorithms for field exploration.