Robotic platforms

Unmanned underwater vehicles can be classified in Remote
Operated Underwater Vehicles (ROVs) (see Fig. 2), Autonomous
Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) (see Fig. 3) and
Underwater Gliders. They differ on the power capability,
power endurance and the task complexity that they have
been designed for.
Underwater vehicles have become a standard tool for data
gathering for Maritime applications. In these environments,
mission effectiveness directly depends on vehicle’s operability.
Operability underlies the vehicle’s final availability,
affordability and acceptance. Two main vehicle characteristics
can improve the vehicle’s operability: reliability relates
to vehicle failures due to the internal hardware components
of the vehicle, and survivability relates to vehicle failures
due to external factors or damages.
Each of these characteristics can be improved by providing
autonomous adaptation of the mission plan and autonomous
adaptation of the trajectory plan respectively.
Both require access to the correspondent levels of perception
in order to build their own situation awareness.
In current implementations, the human operator constitutes
the decision making phase. When high-bandwidth
communication links exist, the operator remains in the loop
during the mission execution. Examples of this approach are
existing ROVs. However, when the communication is poor,
unreliable or not allowed, the operator tries, based only on
Figure 2: Typical ROV inspection operation of a riser with a
fluorometer sensor.
Figure 3: AUV recovery after finishing a mission (courtesy
of SeeByte Ltd.).
the initial orientation or expertise, to include all possible behaviours
to cope with execution alternatives. This has unpredictable
consequences, in which unexpected situations can
cause the mission to abort and might even cause the loss of
the vehicle. Examples of this architecture are current implementations

for AUVs and gliders.