Description
Talk: "Robotized underwater interventions"
This talk provides an overview of the evolution and current state of underwater intervention robotics, with a particular focus on floating manipulation capabilities. Intervention tasks, such as grasping objects, rotating valves, or sliding over surfaces, represent a key frontier in underwater robotics where autonomous vehicles must interact physically with the environment. We trace the development of this field through a series of landmark European and international projects, beginning with SAUVIM, the first demonstration of underwater floating manipulation, and moving through TRIDENT, MARIS, DexROV, ROBUST, TWINBOT, and ATLANTIS. Each project contributed advances in autonomy, manipulation strategies, force control, cooperative robotics, and hardware/software architectures. The talk concludes with an overview of ongoing challenges in perception, decision-making, and robust manipulation in real-world underwater environments.
