Tutorial 1 Hands-on: Autonomous underwater manipulation from a floating I-AUV: Simulation and control strategies

Tutorial 1 Hands-on: Autonomous underwater manipulation from a floating I-AUV: Simulation and control strategies

The tutorial will present a set of open-source tools developed by our research group at the CIRS laboratory, directed towards researchers working in all fields of underwater mobile robotics, i.e., control, planning, vision and navigation. This includes a new advanced simulation software called Stonefish and the recently updated AUV software architecture COLA2. The simulator is designed to be a seamless replacement of the real robot or a group of robots, so that the developments can be quickly tested on the real platforms. It is capable of simulating: full dynamics of vehicle-manipulator systems, including hydrodynamics and buoyancy, functioning of underwater sensors and realistic collisions, as well as delivering high quality rendering. The author will present detailed instructions on how to install and use the software so that the listeners can quickly start using it in their research. Apart from the software tools and the topic of robot simulation, the author will discuss control strategies that can be used in autonomous underwater mobile manipulation, focused around the concepts of the Task-Priority control algorithm, supporting both equality and inequality tasks. Using the presented software, the author will show how the control algorithm performs in practical examples, what kind of tasks have to be used to solve specific problems and how to prioritise them.

The presented software and the simulated scenarios are part of the EU Marine Robots project, funded by the European Community H2020 Programme, under the grant agreement no. 731103.

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The tutorials are consisted of introduction presentation of 30 minutes and hands-on part of 60min. Tutorial hands-on and demos are divided in three groups which will rotate together every hour: