Department name
Department of Engineering
for Innovation
Department name
Department of Engineering
for Innovation
Control Systems, Optimization and Robotics
Research lines
Marine and underwater robotics
The past decades have witnessed growing advances in marine and underwater robotics motivated by the scientific, economical and environmental impact of underwater applications as global climate prediction, deep sea exploration, geophysical and geotechnical surveying, ocean cable inspectance, earthquake prediction, understanding life in remote areas.
Among the many open issues related to the design of autonomous marine systems, one is their motion control. Indeed the hydrodynamic model of marine vehicles is nonlinear, coupled and often underactuated. As a consequence the design of guidance and control laws to achieve pose regulation or path following for either surface or underwater system is challenging.
Underwater environment poses also extreme challenges in terms of communication, localization, and navigation of underwater robots due to the impossibility of relying on radio-based communications and radio-based localization (GPS - Global Positioning System. Underwater communications and navigation mandate the use of acoustic devices that, in the harsh operating scenarios, are plagued with intermittent communication losses and multi-path effects leading to data often corrupted by outliers. Indeed the issue of designing outlier robust underwater navigation systems is of great importance and can turn out to be a quite challenging task.
Moreover, the recent availability of increasingly sophisticated acoustic networks, is also encouraging the use of teams of marine and underwater systems to perform a common mission. This is opening new and more complex challenges in the general area of Cooperative Motion Planning, Navigation and Control.