The Industry 4.0 paradigm emphasizes the crucial benefits that collaborative robots, i.e., robots able to work alongside and together with humans, could bring to the whole production process. In this context, an enabling technology yet unreached is the design of flexible robots able to deal at all levels with humans' intrinsic variability, which is not only a necessary element for a comfortable working experience for the person, but also a precious capability for efficiently dealing with unexpected events. In this paper, a sensing, representation, planning and control architecture for flexible human-robot cooperation, referred to as FlexHRC, is proposed. FlexHRC relies on wearable sensors for human action recognition, AND/OR graphs for the representation of and reasoning upon cooperation models, and a Task Priority framework to decouple action planning from robot motion planning and control.

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles are frequently used for survey missions and monitoring tasks, however manipulation and intervention tasks are still largely performed with a human in the loop.Employing autonomous vehicles for these tasks has received a growing interest in the last ten years, and few pioneering projects have been funded on this topic. Among these projects, the Italian MARIS project had the goal of developing technologies and methodologies for the use of autonomous Underwater Vehicle Manipulator Systems in underwater manipulation and transportation tasks. This work presents the developed control framework, the mechatronic integration, and the project's final experimental results on floating underwater intervention.Index Terms underwater vehicle manipulator system; underwater gripper; underwater vision; floating underwater control; task priority control; underwater intervention.

No abstract

The Italian national project MARIS (Marine Robotics for Interventions) pursues the strategic objective of studying, developing, and integrating technologies and methodologies to enable the development of autonomous underwater robotic systems employable for intervention activities. These activities are becoming progressively more typical for the underwater offshore industry, for search-and-rescue operations, and for underwater scientific missions. Within such an ambitious objective, the project consortium also intends to demonstrate the achievable operational capabilities at a proof-of-concept level by integrating the results with prototype experimental systems.

The paper describes a novel cooperative control policy for the transportation of large objects in underwater environments using two UVMS (Underwater Vehicle Manipulator Systems). Due to the low bandwidth available in underwater scenarios, the main feature of the paper lies in the fact that the cooperative transportation of the commonly grasped object is carried out successfully by just exchanging the tool frame velocities at each sampling instant. A disturbance compensation technique is also presented to cope with sea currents and vehicle velocity tracking errors.