ARSEA

ARSEA - Augmented Reality Subsea Exploration Assistant

Project type: Spanish research project

Period: 2015 - 2017

Thanks to recent technological advances, remote and complex underwater scenarios are more accessible for scientific and industrial activities, such as surveying, sampling, rescue or industrial infrastructure inspection and maintenance. Commercial ROVs are endowed with one or several cameras providing an online view of their surroundings to a human operator who is in charge of remotely piloting them.

The reduced field of view and the difficulty to remotely maneuver a 6DOF vehicle with complex dynamics make the ROV piloting a difficult and error prone task requiring trained operators. Our proposal is aimed at solving these problems by providing an advanced, practical and comfortable user interface with three main goals: 1) To build an online, accurate, 3D reconstruction of the robot and all of the explored surroundings, providing an immersive 1st and 3rd person view of the whole explored environment. In subsequent versions, the pilot will be able to select interest areas which will be enlarged and/or revisited if necessary, to be shown with more detail and better resolution. 2) To allow the human operator to command the robot and select goal points in the reconstruction, switching between autonomous and manual control. 3) To fuse online and previously gathered data to establish temporal correlations and observe long-term changes in the sub-sea such as the grow ratio of underwater flora or the degradation of submerged structures. As a result of this work, underwater inspection tasks would significantly change. On the one hand, the remote operation is facilitated, showing in a virtual reality environment the whole explored area, making it less error prone and allowing non trained operators to drive ROVs focusing their effort on decision taking and fine maneuver. On the other hand, the ROV operating range is increased in space, depth and time when compared to tasks currently performed either by ROVs or human divers. Our proposal could be applied to scientific tasks, such as the study of the growth ratio of underwater flora, usually performed by divers who have limited immersion times, increasing the accuracy of the collected data. Also, it could be applied to industrial tasks, such as evaluating the degradation of underwater structures as well as pipe and power and communication cable inspection.



Project Leader

Antoni Burguera Burguera

Antoni Burguera Burguera

Project Collaborators

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