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MAROFF-2-Maritim virksomhet og offsh-2

MarTERA ADRIATIC, cooperAtion unDerwater foR effIcient operATions vehICles

Alternative title: MarTERA ADRIATIC, cooperAtion unDerwater foR effIcient operATions vehICles

Awarded: NOK 5.7 mill.

A distributed, integrated and coordinated vendor-neutral software framework that enables UWVs, from different manufactures, to share (integrate) functionalities (robot features) in a transparent way. - A distributed set of intelligent components for perception, decision-making and environment recognition capable of assisting the vehicles in characterizing the working environment. - Improved communication technologies as a base of cooperation and information exchange among vehicles, as well as the sensing (vision and acoustic) technologies. - Enhanced control and management services, to assist in the execution of mission´s tasks, entrusting an ADRIATIC platform with creating, monitoring, controlling and managing the mission?s activities autonomously in real-time. - A simulation environment to develop and verify the task planning navigation and the control of the system. Simulation will provide a flexible environment to work on different kinds of environments and vehicles. This way it can provide an environment where software modules can be integrated and mission scenarios can be tested and demonstrated.

The current capabilities of Unmanned Underwater and Unmanned Surface Vehicles (UUVs and USVs) have leveraged the implementation of increasingly complex missions at sea. Thus, nowadays there is a huge interest in the development of advanced techniques for cooperative and coordinated operation by multiple autonomous vehicles, since such approach promises a performance, robustness, flexibility, and adaptability that is unachievable with a single vehicle. Despite the growing interest in the field, most of the ongoing research work is purely theoretical or, if experimental, focused on partial aspects of the whole mission loop and tightly coupled to the available vehicles and architectures in these developments. ADRIATIC aims at taking this situation to the next level by developing a vendor-neutral software framework for mission planning and simulation of cooperative autonomous marine vehicles. This solution will integrate the whole mission loop (Autonomous Navigation; Environment Recognition and Sensing; Water/Underwater Communications) while expanding the functionalities of existing open-source libraries and APIs focused on specific aspects of UUV/USV operation, such as vessel dynamics, guidance, navigation (UUV Simulator, UWSim) or underwater image processing (UNDROIP). A simulation environment will be developed to verify task planning navigation and the system control. This approach will remove the restrictions of having limited access to hardware and will increase software reusability, lowering the existing entrance barrier to UUV/USV operation. ADRIATIC combines the efforts of four companies and one university from three European countries, which common vision is to expand the use of underwater vehicles to facilitate the conception, planning and execution of maritime and offshore operations and missions. This will reduce operational costs, increase the safety of tasks and of involved individuals, and expand the offshore sector.

Funding scheme:

MAROFF-2-Maritim virksomhet og offsh-2