Скачать или смотреть Autonomous Underwater Exploration & Inspection in Visually-degraded Environments

Drone-level autonomy, now underwater!
In The last couple of years, we have invested in the concept of making a unified autonomy solution that can operate virtually universally across robot configurations. As a first major step to that end was to demonstrate that as long as confined or cluttered environments are concerned, we can have aerial robot-level autonomy underwater that is a) exclusively driven by vision in terms of perception (e.g., no sonars), and b) utilizes "generalist" solution for path planning and safety (essentially identical to those in our research for flying robots!). The hidden sauce is - among others - in specialized technology that exploits proprioception in the underwater environment where - as compared to flying systems - there is stronger signal correlation between actuation and response. In this video we demonstrate an instance of this promise with an ROV integrating a 5+1 Camera/IMU system operating completely autonomously in an unfinished submarine base and submarine pen. Stay tuned for many more results on universal autonomy and its application to both flying and underwater systems!