Robotic manipulationwithin the underwater mission planning context: A use case for benchmarking

Abstract

Nowadays, there is an increasing demand for underwater intervention systems around theworld in several application domains. The commercially available systems are far from what is demanded in many aspects, justifying the need of more autonomous, cheap and easy-to-use solutions for underwater intervention missions. The chapter begins making a review of the most important research projects that have been able to demonstrate some results in sea conditions. Then, the expertise and know-how developed in the context of our research group in the last years is presented. Maybe, one of the main achieved results, from the methodological point of view, is a three-layer general system architecture based on the Robot Operating System (ROS), which allows an underwater vehicle to perform interventionmissions with a high degree of autonomy, independently of the targeted scenario. Moreover, the use of an underwater simulator as a 3D simulation tool for benchmarking and Human Robot Interaction (HRI) is also discussed. In summary, a methodology has been developed for experimental validation, independently of the specific underwater intervention problem to solve. It consists on the use of the simulator, as a prior step before moving to any of the testbeds used for experimental validation. The reliability and feasibility of this methodology has been demonstrated for intervention missions in sea trial conditions.