Enabling autonomous capabilities in underwater robotics

TLDR

Underwater operations pose unique challenges and opportunities for robotics, due to limited sensing and the need for task‑specific locomotion control schemes. The study seeks to enable autonomous capabilities by reviewing approaches employed during sea trials of amphibious mobile robots and underwater sensor nodes in Barbados. The authors describe a suite of methods tested in Barbados sea trials, including trajectory‑maintaining control for teleoperation, amphibious data‑gathering experiments, a vision‑based tetherless communication system for.

Abstract

Underwater operations present unique challenges and opportunities for robotic applications. These can be attributed in part to limited sensing capabilities, and to locomotion behaviours requiring control schemes adapted to specific tasks or changes in the environment. From enhancing teleoperation procedures, to providing high-level instruction, all the way to fully autonomous operations, enabling autonomous capabilities is fundamental for the successful deployment of underwater robots. This paper presents an overview of the approaches used during underwater sea trials in the coral reefs of Barbados, for two amphibious mobile robots and a set of underwater sensor nodes. We present control mechanisms used for maintaining a preset trajectory during enhanced teleoperations and discuss their experimental results. This is followed by a discussion on amphibious data gathering experiments conducted on the beach. We then present a tetherless underwater communication approach based on pure vision for high-level control of an underwater vehicle. Finally the construction details together with preliminary results from a set of distributed underwater sensor nodes are outlined.