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

TRIDENT: A Framework for Autonomous Underwater Intervention

TRIDENT is a STREP project recently approved by the European Commission whose proposal was submitted to the ICT call 4 of the 7th Framework Program. The project proposes a new methodology for multipurpose underwater intervention tasks. To that end, a cooperative team formed with an Autonomous Surface Craft and an Intervention Autonomous Underwater Vehicle will be used. The proposed methodology splits the mission in two stages mainly devoted to survey and intervention tasks, respectively. The project brings together research skills specific to the marine environments in navigation and mapping for underwater robotics, multi-sensory perception, intelligent control architectures, vehiclemanipulator systems and dexterous manipulation. TRIDENT is a three years project and its start is planned by first months of 2010.This work is partially supported by the European Commission through FP7-ICT2009-248497 projec

Towards automated sample collection and return in extreme underwater environments

© The Author(s), 2022. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License. The definitive version was published in Billings, G., Walter, M., Pizarro, O., Johnson-Roberson, M., & Camilli, R. Towards automated sample collection and return in extreme underwater environments. Journal of Field Robotics, 2(1), (2022): 1351–1385, https://doi.org/10.55417/fr.2022045.In this report, we present the system design, operational strategy, and results of coordinated multivehicle field demonstrations of autonomous marine robotic technologies in search-for-life missions within the Pacific shelf margin of Costa Rica and the Santorini-Kolumbo caldera complex, which serve as analogs to environments that may exist in oceans beyond Earth. This report focuses on the automation of remotely operated vehicle (ROV) manipulator operations for targeted biological sample-collection-and-return from the seafloor. In the context of future extraterrestrial exploration missions to ocean worlds, an ROV is an analog to a planetary lander, which must be capable of high-level autonomy. Our field trials involve two underwater vehicles, the SuBastian ROV and the Nereid Under Ice (NUI) hybrid ROV for mixed initiative (i.e., teleoperated or autonomous) missions, both equipped seven-degrees-of-freedom hydraulic manipulators. We describe an adaptable, hardware-independent computer vision architecture that enables high-level automated manipulation. The vision system provides a three-dimensional understanding of the workspace to inform manipulator motion planning in complex unstructured environments. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the vision system and control framework through field trials in increasingly challenging environments, including the automated collection and return of biological samples from within the active undersea volcano Kolumbo. Based on our experiences in the field, we discuss the performance of our system and identify promising directions for future research.This work was funded under a NASA PSTAR grant, number NNX16AL08G, and by the National Science Foundation under grants IIS-1830660 and IIS-1830500. The authors would like to thank the Costa Rican Ministry of Environment and Energy and National System of Conservation Areas for permitting research operations at the Costa Rican shelf margin, and the Schmidt Ocean Institute (including the captain and crew of the R/V Falkor and ROV SuBastian) for their generous support and making the FK181210 expedition safe and highly successful. Additionally, the authors would like to thank the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs for permitting the 2019 Kolumbo Expedition to the Kolumbo and Santorini calderas, as well as Prof. Evi Nomikou and Dr. Aggelos Mallios for their expert guidance and tireless contributions to the expedition

Service-oriented agent architecture for autonomous maritime vehicles

Advanced ocean systems are increasing their capabilities and the degree of autonomy more and more in order to perform more sophisticated maritime missions. Remotely operated vehicles are no longer cost-effective since they are limited by economic support costs, and the presence and skills of the human operator. Alternatively, autonomous surface and underwater vehicles have the potential to operate with greatly reduced overhead costs and level of operator intervention. This Thesis proposes an Intelligent Control Architecture (ICA) to enable multiple collaborating marine vehicles to autonomously carry out underwater intervention missions. The ICA is generic in nature but aimed at a case study where a marine surface craft and an underwater vehicle are required to work cooperatively. They are capable of cooperating autonomously towards the execution of complex activities since they have different but complementary capabilities. The architectural foundation to achieve the ICA lays on the flexibility of service-oriented computing and agent technology. An ontological database captures the operator skills, platform capabilities and, changes in the environment. The information captured, stored as knowledge, enables reasoning agents to plan missions based on the current situation. The ICA implementation is verified in simulation, and validated in trials by means of a team of autonomous marine robots. This Thesis also presents architectural details and evaluation scenarios of the ICA, results of simulations and trials from different maritime operations, and future research directions

I-AUV Docking and Panel Intervention at Sea

The use of commercially available autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) has increased during the last fifteen years. While they are mainly used for routine survey missions, there is a set of applications that nowadays can be only addressed by manned submersibles or work-class remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) equipped with teleoperated arms: the intervention applications. To allow these heavy vehicles controlled by human operators to perform intervention tasks, underwater structures like observatory facilities, subsea panels or oil-well Christmas trees have been adapted, making them more robust and easier to operate. The TRITON Spanish founded project proposes the use of a light-weight intervention AUV (I-AUV) to carry out intervention applications simplifying the adaptation of these underwater structures and drastically reducing the operational cost. To prove this concept, the Girona 500 I-AUV is used to autonomously dock into an adapted subsea panel and once docked perform an intervention composed of turning a valve and plugging in/unplugging a connector. The techniques used for the autonomous docking and manipulation as well as the design of an adapted subsea panel with a funnel-based docking system are presented in this article together with the results achieved in a water tank and at sea.This work was supported by the Spanish project DPI2014-57746-C3 (MERBOTS Project) and by Generalitat Valenciana under Grant GVA-PROMETEO/2016/066. The University of Girona wants to thank the SARTI group for their collaboration with the TRITON project

I-AUV Docking and Panel Intervention at Sea

The use of commercially available autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) has increased during the last fifteen years. While they are mainly used for routine survey missions, there is a set of applications that nowadays can be only addressed by manned submersibles or work-class remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) equipped with teleoperated arms: the intervention applications. To allow these heavy vehicles controlled by human operators to perform intervention tasks, underwater structures like observatory facilities, subsea panels or oil-well Christmas trees have been adapted, making them more robust and easier to operate. The TRITON Spanish founded project proposes the use of a light-weight intervention AUV (I-AUV) to carry out intervention applications simplifying the adaptation of these underwater structures and drastically reducing the operational cost. To prove this concept, the Girona 500 I-AUV is used to autonomously dock into an adapted subsea panel and once docked perform an intervention composed of turning a valve and plugging in/unplugging a connector. The techniques used for the autonomous docking and manipulation as well as the design of an adapted subsea panel with a funnel-based docking system are presented in this article together with the results achieved in a water tank and at sea.This work was supported by the Spanish project DPI2014-57746-C3 (MERBOTS Project) and by Generalitat Valenciana under Grant GVA-PROMETEO/2016/066. The University of Girona wants to thank the SARTI group for their collaboration with the TRITON project

3D laser scanner for underwater manipulation

Nowadays, research in autonomous underwater manipulation has demonstrated simple applications like picking an object from the sea floor, turning a valve or plugging and unplugging a connector. These are fairly simple tasks compared with those already demonstrated by the mobile robotics community, which include, among others, safe arm motion within areas populated with a priori unknown obstacles or the recognition and location of objects based on their 3D model to grasp them. Kinect-like 3D sensors have contributed significantly to the advance of mobile manipulation providing 3D sensing capabilities in real-time at low cost. Unfortunately, the underwater robotics community is lacking a 3D sensor with similar capabilities to provide rich 3D information of the work space. In this paper, we present a new underwater 3D laser scanner and demonstrate its capabilities for underwater manipulation. In order to use this sensor in conjunction with manipulators, a calibration method to find the relative position between the manipulator and the 3D laser scanner is presented. Then, two different advanced underwater manipulation tasks beyond the state of the art are demonstrated using two different manipulation systems. First, an eight Degrees of Freedom (DoF) fixed-base manipulator system is used to demonstrate arm motion within a work space populated with a priori unknown fixed obstacles. Next, an eight DoF free floating Underwater Vehicle-Manipulator System (UVMS) is used to autonomously grasp an object from the bottom of a water tank