Abstract
The need for intervention in underwater environments has increased in recent years but there is still a long way to go before AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicleswill be able to cope with really challenging missions. Nowadays, the solution adopted is mainly based on remote operated vehicle (ROV) technology. These ROVs are controlled from support vessels by using unnecessarily complex human–robot interfaces (HRI). Therefore, it is necessary to reduce the complexity of these systems to make them easier to use and to reduce the stress on the operator. In this paper, and as part of the TWIN roBOTs for the cooperative underwater intervention missions (TWINBOT) project, we present an HRI (Human-Robot Interface) module which includes virtual reality (VR) technology. In fact, this contribution is an improvement on a preliminary study in this field also carried out, by our laboratory. Hence, having made a concerted effort to improve usability, the HRI system designed for robot control tasks presented in this paper is substantially easier to use. In summary, reliability and feasibility of this HRI module have been demonstrated thanks to the usability tests, which include a very complete pilot study, and guarantee much more friendly and intuitive properties in the final HRI-developed module presented here.
Highlights
Nowadays, underwater tasks, like the maintenance of underwater equipment or the deployment and recovery of benthic stations, are addressed using manned submersibles or work-class remote operated vehicles (ROVs) equipped with teleoperated arms
While commercially available autonomous underwater vehicles are regularly used in survey missions, there is a new set of tasks that demand intervention capabilities, because of the increased level of complexity involved [2]
We created a functional simulation from which performance and accuracy data of the virtual reality (VR) interface could be extracted, and we did some tests to identify the performance of the graphics cards used
Summary
Underwater tasks, like the maintenance of underwater equipment or the deployment and recovery of benthic stations, are addressed using manned submersibles or work-class remote operated vehicles (ROVs) equipped with teleoperated arms. While commercially available autonomous underwater vehicles are regularly used in survey missions, there is a new set of tasks that demand intervention capabilities, because of the increased level of complexity involved [2]. Current intervention-AUV (I-AUV) prototypes are big and complex systems that provide only a limited set of functionalities. These functionalities include docking and fixed-based manipulation on a subsea panel, as well as search and recovery of simple objects
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