Autonomous Underwater Intervention: Experimental Results of the MARIS Project

—Autonomous underwater vehicles are frequently used for survey missions and monitoring tasks, however, manipulation and intervention tasks are still largely performed with a human in the loop. Employing autonomous vehicles for these tasks has received a growing interest in the last ten years, and few pioneering projects have been funded on this topic. Among these projects, the Italian MARIS project had the goal of developing technologies and methodologies for the use of autonomous underwater vehicle manipulator systems in underwater manipulation and transportation tasks. This work presents the developed control framework, the mechatronic integration, and the project’s final experimental results on floating underwater intervention.