Advanced Underwater Manipulation Systems: An Overview of the SUONO Project

In the last decades, the demanded tasks for subsea operations have become more and more challenging as, for instance, intervention, maintenance and repair of seabed installations. These activities are becoming more typical for the underwater offshore industry, search-and-rescue operations, or underwater scientific missions. Motivated by these considerations, this paper presents an overview of the Italian SUONO (Safe Underwater Operations iN Oceans) project, which involves the Department of Industrial Engineering (DIEF) of the University of Florence, a node of the Italian Research Center on Integrated System for the Marine Environment (ISME), Italy, and four other Italian partners, from Academia as well as Industry. More in detail, the SUONO project aims to integrate technologies and methodologies to enable the development of autonomous underwater robotic systems employable for intervention activities as, for instance, a free-floating manipulation task on a subsea panel. As a result, the whole control strategy must also consider all of a series of different objectives, starting from operational to safety aspects. Examples of such goals are reaching the desired end-effector pose and keeping the robotic arm joints far from the physical limits. The proposed methodology is based on the well-known Task Priority Inverse Kinematics (TPIK) framework, which also enables the possibility to handle inequality constraints. Additionally, a perception system, able to accurately understanding and managing the surrounding environment, is hereby presented. Finally, the preliminary results, supporting the proposed control strategy and the perception architecture, are presented and motivated in detail.