Distributed mixed reality for remote underwater telerobotics exploration

Abstract

The visionary objective of this work is to "open to people connected to the internet, an access to ocean depths anytime, anywhere." Today these people can just perceive the changing surface of the sea from the shores, but ignore almost everything on what is hidden. If they could explore seabed and become knowledgeable, they would get eventually involved in finding alternative solutions for our vital terrestrial problems -pollution, climate changes, and destruction of biodiversity and exhaustion of Earth resources. The introduction of Mixed Reality and Internet in aquatic activities constitutes a technological rupture when compared with the status of existing related technologies. Through Internet, anyone, anywhere, at any moment will be naturally able to dive in real-time using a Remote Operated Vehicle (ROV) in the most remarkable sites around the world. The heart of this work is focused on Mixed Reality. The main challenge is to reach real time display of digital video stream to web users, by mixing 3D entities (objects or pre-processed underwater terrain surfaces), with 2D videos of live images collected in real time by a teleoperated ROV.

Virtual Reality and Oceanography: Overview, Applications, and Perspective

“…Photogrammetric approaches to the reconstruction of underwater 3D maps is a recent development, and provides a cost-effective, accurate, and reproducible method to re-creating marine habitats (Kwasnitschka et al, 2013;Marre et al, 2019). In support of this growing data capacity, network architecture also continues to improve, with internet connected ships (Raineault et al, 2018) and ROVs enabling multiple users to coordinate efforts simultaneously with the aid of real time AR applications (Chouiten et al, 2012).…”

Underwater Mixed Environments

“…The following examples adapt Augmented Reality hardware to be used in an underwater setting for entertainment purposes: the DOLPHYN-based game [9], the ARenriched tele-operation of a ROV [19], or the AREEF -Augmented Reality for Waterbased Entertainment, Education and Fun [53].…”

Explicit Homogeneous Time-varying Stabilizing Control of a Submarine Vehicle (ROV)

“…Figure 1: The ROV at 5 m depth (Chouiten et al, 2012) This vehicle is actuated with two reversible horizontal thrusters F 1x and F 2x for surge and yaw motion, and a reversible vertical thruster F 3z for heave motion. A 150 meters cable provides electric power to the thrusters and enables communication between the vehicle sensors and the surface equipment (Fig.1).…”