Enrica Zereik

Italian National Research Council | CNR · INstitute of Marine engineering - INM (former ISSIA)

In the paper, we describe our studies to realize a control algorithm for distributed marine robots with rigid/elastic mechanical constraints between them. The work is carried out in the framework of the EUMR TNA project DINGOS. Our strategy follows the line to adapt conventional cooperative path-following algorithms from literature to the described...

The main aim of this article is to provide an example of reproducible research in robotics. Despite the fact that a large number of researchers agree on the need of reproducibility in robotics and artificial intelligence, the practice of reproducible research is still in an embryonic phase. As a matter of fact, IEEE Robotics and Automation Magazine...

Formation control and cooperative motion planning are two major research areas currently being used in multi robot motion planning and coordination. The current study proposes a hybrid framework for guidance and navigation of swarm of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) by combining the key characteristics of formation control and cooperative motion p...

The article describes a highly trustable environmental monitoring system employing a small scalable swarm of small-sized marine vessels equipped with compact sensors and intended for the monitoring of water resources and infrastructures. The technological foundation of the process which guarantees that any third party can not alter the samples take...

In this paper, we describe a preliminary experiment of citizenship engagement in the context of marine robotics using imitation learning to train a controller that mimics human behavior. The experiment has been carried out during the Festival della Comunicazione in Camogli, Italy, in September 2019. In more detail, citizens have been asked to pilot...

The proposed paper presents the design and development of the combined guidance and control strategies for the autonomous navigation of unmanned vessels characterised by azimuth-based thrust architecture. Autonomous marine vehicles (AMVs) are consolidated technological tools commonly employed for different tasks such as exploration, sampling and in...

In this article, we present a novel underwater dataset collected from several field trials within the EU FP7 project “Cognitive autonomous diving buddy (CADDY)”, where an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) was used to interact with divers and monitor their activities. To our knowledge, this is one of the first efforts to collect a large public dat...

Given the huge rising interest in autonomous drone swarms to be employed in actual marine applications, the present paper explores the possibility to recover a distressed vessel by means of the other agents belonging to the swarm itself. Suitable approaches and control strategies are developed and tested to find the highest performance algorithms....

The environmental chemical conditions - in terms of substances with positive and negative impacts on the sustainability of local ecological networks - of confined environments with weak currents change over time in probabilistically predictable ways. We are developing a reproducible and measurable approach to the deployment of complex adaptive netw...

The proposed paper presents the design and development of the combined guidance and control strategies for the autonomous navigation of an unmanned vessel characterized by azimuth-based thrust architecture. Autonomous Marine Vehicles (AMVs) are consolidates technological tools commonly employed for different tasks such as exploration, sampling and...

Spawned by fast paced progress in marine science and technology, the past two decades have witnessed growing interest in ocean exploration and exploitation for scientific and commercial purposes, the development of technological products for the maritime and offshore industries, and a host of other activities in which the marine environment takes c...

The underwater environment is characterized by hazardous conditions that make it difficult to manage and monitor even the simplest human operation. The introduction of a robot companion with the task of supporting and monitoring the divers during their activities and operations underwater can help to solve some of the problems that usually arise in...

In this article we present a novel underwater dataset collected from several field trials within the EU FP7 project "Cognitive autonomous diving buddy (CADDY)", where an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) was used to interact with divers and monitor their activities. To our knowledge, this is one of the first efforts to collect a large dataset in...

Autonomous underwater operations require robust and accurate navigation capabilities, a basic requirement for both precise position and velocity estimation, as well as motion compensation and geo-referencing of exteroceptive sensor data. A great number of theoretical approaches to sensor fusion and filtering can be found in literature, but they hav...

This paper reports the development of a new methodology for automatic detection and mapping of underwater vegetation by means of highly autonomous marine robotic platforms. In particular, the work describes the exploitation of a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV), equipped with a multi-parametric sensors package, for the exploration and characterizati...

The Italian national project MARIS (Marine Robotics for Interventions) pursues the strategic objective of studying, developing, and integrating technologies and methodologies to enable the development of autonomous underwater robotic systems employable for intervention activities. These activities are becoming progressively more typical for the und...

Abstract This paper reports the description of the different types of robotic platforms currently employed in hull cleaning and ship inspection tasks, related to maintenance and classification operations. The functional requirements of the specific applications and characteristics of the different class of vehicles are presented and compared. The p...

This paper presents an extensive analysis of the integral line-of-sight (ILOS) guidance method for path-following tasks of underactuated marine vehicles, operating on and below the sea surface. It is shown that due to the embedded integral action, the guidance law makes the vessels follow straight lines by compensating for the drift effect of envir...

Robotic vision is a very powerful tool that has to be further explored and refined in order to highly improve robots’ behaviour; in particular, it plays a key role in the achievement of a reliable and strong interaction between man and machine. The more natural this interaction becomes for humans, the more popular robotics will grow: being able to...

This paper focuses on the control strategy needed by marine robots to be able to follow moving paths within a cooperative framework. This control aspect is essential in order to effectively perform emergency ship towing operations. In particular, these robots coordinate their motion, with the aim of performing an autonomous tying operation, linking...

In the field of marine robotics it is particularly important to endow the robot with a safe and highly reliable Navigation Guidance and Control (NGC) system which enables the Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) to safely navigate even in presence of human activities such as commercial and recreational traffic, swimmers, rowers, etc...A key aspect to a...

Control of robots for underwater intervention and manipulation in real world applications is very challenging due high environmental uncertainties. Techniques based on Belief Space Planning (BSP) are very promising in order to achieve robust robot behaviors in the presence of uncertainties within complex and unstructured scenarios. Here a BSP strat...

Robotics nowadays is a mature discipline. For its widespread employment in real civilian scenarios, in close contacts with humans, additional efforts are needed to establish standards and common procedures to evaluate and assess robot performance. A methodology for performance evaluation is here proposed and some indices are formalized for the eval...

Robotics is becoming part of our daily life through home automation (called domotic) and assistive applications that are taking place in habitations, up to industrial and service employments. With this strict cooperation between humans and robots, it is of absolute necessity to assess the robotic systems' capabilities and performance to ensure safe...

This paper focuses on the development of a cooperative guidance system allowing two marine robotic platforms, one on the surface and the other operating underwater, to coordinate their motion in order to fulfil the goal of supporting diver operations during dive campaigns. In the scope of EU FP7 CADDY Project, the proposed paper deals with the spec...

Marine robotics is becoming increasingly more effective and useful for many applications in the real world. This process of technological transfer strongly needs the actual achievement of full autonomy and high reliability of the robotics systems. Hence, many works conducted by the marine robotics community are aimed to further enhance control tech...

In robotics, nowadays, there is a strong evergrowing interest in executing replicable experiments to assess robots performance. This demand can't be easy fulfilled without established ad-hoc procedures to be followed. To this aim, an innovative software framework named DeepRuler is proposed. The presented software is able to design, automatically e...

In the present work, a method based on belief space planning, assuming maximum likelihood of the observations, is applied to the planning of manipulation for an underwater robotic arm. The manipulator is rigidly connected to a floating platform, such as a ROV (Remotely Operated Vehicle) or an AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle). The arm and platfor...

The need for the transfer of robotic technology from the research laboratories to civilian applications is now a major issue for the robotic community. In the field of marine robotics is particularly important to endow the robot with a safe and highly reliable Navigation Guidance and Control (NGC) system which enables the Unmanned Surface Vehicle (...

Underwater environment is characterized by harsh conditions and is difficult to monitor. The CADDY project deals with the development of a companion robot devoted to support and to monitor human operations and activities during the dive. In this scenario the communication and correct reception of messages between the diver and the robot are essenti...

The purpose of this work is the development of a hybrid guidance and control system for the trajectory tracking task of an underactuated Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV). The novelty of the guidance system is based on neural dynamics and sliding mode integration. The biological neural dynamics model is designed to smooth the outputs of the sliding mo...

Acoustic technology is one of the most effective tool in investigating seabed characteristics because of the sound property to propagate for long distance in the water. For this reason analysis of acoustic spectra of seafloor is suitable to identify many physical aspects such as reflectivity, absorption coefficient, etc. connected to different kind...

The need for technological transfer of robotic technology, already available and well established at research level, is now a major issue for the robotic community in order to address applications within civilian scenarios. In particular, concerning the marine and maritime context, safe and highly reliable navigation guidance and control (NGC) syst...

accepted

Introducing robotic technology within the diving context is a very promising idea in order to improve and optimize conditions of divers during missions, both in terms of easiness and in terms of safety. In fact, a diver companion robot can support the diver by carrying bulky equipment, helping in various tasks and also correctly and promptly reacti...

The aim of this work is the exploitation of an Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) for visual and acoustic characterization of the seafloor in shallow water coastal environments, through combined acquisition of echograms and video images. To this purpose, the employed vehicle is composed by two systems: i) a leading USV, equipped with an advanced missio...

A recently proposed Integral Line-of-Sight (ILOS) guidance law is applied to an underactuated Unmanned Semi-Submersible Vehicle (USSV) for path following of straight lines. Derived from the popular Line-of-Sight guidance, the ILOS methods adds integral action to increase robustness with respect to environmental disturbances such as sea currents, wi...

Guidance and control system development for Unmanned Marine Vehicles is a well known and consolidated issue, but a general guideline for quantitatively measuring the performance of robotic systems and comparing them is still lacking in the literature. The importance of establishing standards to follow has become more and more stronger, in particula...

This paper presents a collision avoidance algorithm based on the virtual target path-following guidance technique, developed for Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV) multiagent frameworks. The proposed collision avoidance procedure is integrated with the distributed guidance module already developed for cooperative and coordinated navigation of USVs, in...

A current trend in marine robotics consists of performance evaluation of Unmanned Marine Vehicles (UMVs) guidance systems. This paper contributes to this by defining and testing performance indices and metrics to quantitatively measure and compare path-following performance. It focuses on the definition of a new criterion for evaluating the capabil...

This article proposes a swarm-based path-following guidance system for an autonomous marine multi-vehicle system. In particular, a team of unmanned surface vehicles is required to converge to and navigate along a desired reference path, while at the same time aggregating and maintaining a range-based formation configuration. First, a separate descr...

This work proposes the exploitation and results of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) for the bathymetric sampling application. In particular the paper reports the high-resolution data set collected during a first sampling campaign carried out in the Loano area (sited in Liguria region, Italy). The sampling campaign covered the Loano beach area which...

Visual odometry (VO) is very important for a mobile robot, above all in a planetary scenario, to accurately estimate the rover occurred motion. The present work deals with the possibility to improve a previously developed VO technique by means of additional image processing, together with suitable mechanisms such as the classical Extended/Iterated...

As marine robotics becomes more and more effective and useful for many real applications, control techniques too must be gradually enhance in order to answer to the arising need of full autonomy for such vehicles. Hence more advanced control algorithms are currently under-development in the marine robotics community in order to accomplish many task...

This paper focuses on the improvement of a swarm-based path-following guidance system for an autonomous marine multi-vehicle system. In the seminal idea a team of Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) is required to join into a formation by means of a potential-based swarm aggregation methodology, while a virtual-target based guidance module drives the...

This article presents a real-time mosaicking algorithm based on a SLAM framework. The mosaic of the seafloor can be useful in real time for a ROV operator that is piloting the ROV. Two important aspects arise in this kind of work: data association and computational time. In order to solve the first one, a combination of SURF features and template c...

This paper focuses on the improvement of a virtual target based path-following guidance system for the execution of coordinated manoeuvres within a multi-vehicle framework, with the chance of defining moving reference paths. The analysis of a Lyapunov-based guidance algorithm is carried out keeping into account the presence of a reference path's ve...

This paper proposes the employment of marine robotic platforms for emergency ship towing operations. Automatic guidance algorithms are developed with the aim of providing cooperation and coordination of robots' motion. In particular a line-following technique is proposed as well as an improvement to a virtual target based path-following technique i...

In recent years, interest in space activities has grown more and more and there are future space exploration plans that include human missions to the Moon and Mars. The return to the Moon will rely on a large robotic presence to support exploration and, later, to assist the building of the lunar base. These plans will thus require the availability...

The proposed paper is part of a research program centered on CNR-ISSIA Unmanned Surface Vehicles. It focuses on the definition of good experimental methodologies and practices as well as suitable metrics for performance evaluation in order to carry out repeatable experiments for Unmanned Marine Vehicles. Preliminary theoretical results, validated o...

The need for actual autonomy in underwater robotic systems is rapidly increasing. Many challenging issues derive from such a trend, one in all the requirement of coordinately controlling the motion of an underwater floating I-AUV endowing a robotic arm, to accomplish complex manipulation tasks. This work is aimed to present a strategy based on the...

Robotics plays a key role in space exploration activities, as autonomous mobile manipulators can relieve humans from dangerous tasks and accomplish difficult operations. Many capabilities are needed by such systems: from navigation and localization issues, to data fusion for robust motion estimation and environment perception. To this aim, techniqu...

The present paper deals with a specific part of the activities performed within the currently on going EU-FP7 funded project TRIDENT (http://www.irs.uji.es/trident), whose objectives include the development of a multipurpose Intervention Autonomous Underwa- ter Vehicle (I-AUV) exhibiting smart manipulation capabilities within unstructured underwate...

The need for actual autonomy in underwater vehicle is rapidly increasing. Many challenging issues derive from such a trend, one in all the need of controlling the motion of an I-AUV to accomplish complex tasks. To this aim, this work presents a control coordination strategy based on Task Priorities and Dynamic Programming techniques for an I-AUV en...

Many research activities are being carried out about space exploration missions, in order to strongly improve man’s working conditions in planetary environments. Along this line, this work presents some results obtained within the development of an effective robotic crew assistant. This robot can execute a number of operations, both in a completely...

In recent years, planet exploration has received an increasing interest due to the possibility of exploiting planet resources and assuring a human–robotic colonized presence on suitable planetary surfaces. These goals can be reached through the development of smart robots, which are able to work on their own and without requiring a constant human s...

The paper deals with the problem of suitably coordinating the movement of two mobile manipulators in order to ac