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Underwater manipulation is a challenging problem. The state of the art is dominated by Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV). ROV operations typically require an offshore crew consisting of at least an intendant, an operator, and a navigator. This crew often has to be duplicated or even tripled due to work shifts. In addition, customer representatives often wish to be physically present offshore. Furthermore, underwater intervention missions are still dominated by a significant amount of low-level, manual control of the manipulator(s) and of the vehicle itself. While there is a significant amount of research on Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV) in general and there are even already fieldable solutions for inspection and exploration missions, there is still quite some room for adding intelligent autonomous functions for interventions. We present here work to reduce the amount of robot operators required offshore - hence reducing cost and inconveniences - by facilitating operations from an onshore control center and reducing the gap between low-level teleoperation and full autonomy.

The operation of a ROV requires significant off-shore dedicated manpower to handle and operate the robotic platform. In order to reduce the burden of operations, DexROV proposes to work out more cost effective and time efficient ROV operations, where manned support is in a large extent delocalized onshore (i.e. from a ROV control center), possibly at a large distance from the actual operations, relying on satellite communications. The proposed scheme makes provision for advanced dexterous manipulation capabilities, exploiting human expertise from a remote location when deemed useful. The outcomes of the project will be integrated and evaluated in a series of tests and evaluation campaigns, culminating with a realistic deep sea (1,300 meters) trial. After one year, the project specified the system architecture of the system and carried out preliminary technological trade-offs for the subsystems.