Autonomous robot for underwater intervention tasks

Universitat Jaume I
May 16, 2011

Researchers from the national project RAUVI [Reconfigurable autonomous underwater vehicle for intervention], which is coordinated by Pedro Sanz, a lecturer of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence at the UJI, have successfully tested the autonomy of the robot for developing underwater intervention tasks. The robot has achieved to recover an object similar to an aircraft black box without the direction of any operator.

The test was performed last week at the Universitat de Girona, where there is a pool suitable for experimentation on underwater robotics. During the meeting, the researchers also tested the performance of the three parts involved in the experiment: the robotic arm, which is being improved by the UJI; the vehicle, in which the Universitat de Girona is working, and the computer vision techniques, which are being developed by the Universitat de les Illes Balears.

In the first part of the experiment the vehicle in which the robot was anchored descended to the bottom of the pool to survey the area using computer vision techniques and to draw a map. After that, the researchers asked the robot to recover an object (a black box), and the vehicle with the robotic arm plunged again, sought the object with the required characteristics, picked it up and pulled it to the surface.
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