Development of a Semi-Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for Intervention Missions (SAUVIM Phase III-B)

TLDR: The Semi-Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for Intervention Missions (SAUVIM) as mentioned in this paper is a semi-autonomous underwater vehicle that is capable of performing underwater manipulation in an unstructured environment.

Abstract: : SAUVIM (Semi Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for Intervention Missions) involves the design and fabrication of an underwater vehicle that it is capable of autonomous interventions on the subsea installations, a task usually carried out by ROVs or human divers. The present final report covers the Phase III-C of SAUVIM. This is the conclusive phase of the project, which hosted further major upgrades and, most important, the demonstration of the first fully autonomous underwater manipulation in an unstructured environment. Submerged in the water, in its final demonstration, SAUVIM first performed the self-calibration routine, initializing its sub-systems. After the calibration step, SAUVIM began its pre-given mission -- to search for and tag an underwater object. The object's location was roughly given. Once the vehicle reached the area surrounding the object, it started scanning the area using a DIDSON camera to locate and identify the target. Once the object was detected, the vehicle approached it and positioned itself for optimized manipulation. Then, while the vehicle was floating in the water column, using the unified coordinated motion control of the vehicle and manipulator system, the vehicle performed an autonomous manipulation task by applying a device to the object for tagging. After completing the mission, the vehicle came back to the dock by using feature-based navigation. The whole sequence was autonomously done and the same mission was successfully repeated four times. This demonstration presented a technological breakthrough in the field as autonomous manipulation had been a bottleneck issue for underwater intervention missions.