Underwater intervention robotics: An outline of the Italian national project Maris

The Italian national project MARIS (Marine Robotics for Interventions) pursues the strategic objective of studying, developing, and integrating technologies and methodologies to enable the development of autonomous underwater robotic systems employable for intervention activities. These activities are becoming progressively more typical for the underwater offshore industry, for search-and-rescue operations, and for underwater scientific missions. Within such an ambitious objective, the project consortium also intends to demonstrate the achievable operational capabilities at a proof-of-concept level by integrating the results with prototype experimental systems

Optimization of Potential Field Method Parameters through networks for Swarm Cooperative Manipulation Tasks

An interesting current research field related to autonomous robots is mobile manipulation performed by cooperating robots (in terrestrial, aerial and underwater environments). Focusing on the underwater scenario, cooperative manipulation of Intervention-Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (I-AUVs) is a complex and difficult application compared with the terrestrial or aerial ones because of many technical issues, such as underwater localization and limited communication. A decentralized approach for cooperative mobile manipulation of I-AUVs based on Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) is proposed in this article. This strategy exploits the potential field method; a multi-layer control structure is developed to manage the coordination of the swarm, the guidance and navigation of I-AUVs and the manipulation task. In the article, this new strategy has been implemented in the simulation environment, simulating the transportation of an object. This object is moved along a desired trajectory in an unknown environment and it is transported by four underwater mobile robots, each one provided with a seven-degrees-of-freedom robotic arm. The simulation results are optimized thanks to the ANNs used for the potentials tuning

Autonomous Underwater Intervention: Experimental Results of the MARIS Project

open11noopenSimetti, E. ;Wanderlingh, F. ;Torelli, S. ;Bibuli, M. ;Odetti, A. ;Bruzzone, G. ; Lodi Rizzini, D. ;Aleotti, J. ;Palli, G. ;Moriello, L. ;Scarcia, U.Simetti, E.; Wanderlingh, F.; Torelli, S.; Bibuli, M.; Odetti, Angelo; Bruzzone, G.; Lodi Rizzini, D.; Aleotti, J.; Palli, G.; Moriello, L.; Scarcia, U

On Autonomous Robotic Cooperation Capabilities within Factory and Logistic Scenarios

The paper presents the development of a unified functional, algorithmic and Software (Sw) architecture, which can be adopted as a standard for controlling, at action level only, any robotic structure within a given wide class of them; even of reconfigurable type within the class. Such control architecture is therefore deemed very suitable for operating within factory and/or logistic, possibly reconfigurable, scenarios. Moreover, for the few cases of cooperative activities to be established between agents not allowed to be cable connected, an effective coordination policy, based on the exchange of a reduced information set, only regarding the cooperation goals, is developed; and relevant simulative and experimental trials are briefly outlined. Moreover, the advantage of having, in whatever operative condition, the possibility of commanding the involved structures only in terms of the ultimate goals of each action, also seems to be the right basis for having non-negligible improvements within their integration with automated action planning, and even learning, techniques

Aerial Manipulation: A Literature Review

Aerial manipulation aims at combining the versatil- ity and the agility of some aerial platforms with the manipulation capabilities of robotic arms. This letter tries to collect the results reached by the research community so far within the field of aerial manipulation, especially from the technological and control point of view. A brief literature review of general aerial robotics and space manipulation is carried out as well