New Project and New Underwater Robot for New Missions

Abstract

Autonomous underwater vehicles have been used for relatively simple tasks such as underwater sampling, surveying and characterization of resources. One reason could be that underwater is very difficult environment to implement complex mission, but considering ground robots, underwater robot intelligence is not enough to achieve given missions. Korea Ocean Research & Development Institute (KORDI) just started a five-year project named "Development of technologies for an underwater robot based on artificial intelligence for highly sophisticated missions" from 2010 to study robotic intelligence for underwater robot systematically. This project will make a big step for 3D underwater SLAM (Simultaneous localization and mapping) under some reasonable constraints through AI based underwater environment cognition and mission based common platform technologies of hardware and software for commercialization. As the first year of the project, we are currently developing an underwater robot. This paper briefly explains the purpose of new project and addresses specifications and main features of new underwater robot as well as expected results. By the time of the conference, real pictures of the robot and experimental results could be ready to be shown.