Underwater communication requirements in coordinated autonomous manipulation: The MARIS project

This paper addresses the communication requirements needed within the MARIS project, which involves several Italian institutions. The goal of the MARIS project is to develop technologies for autonomous underwater interventions, in particular to enable two floating manipulators in executing joint grasping and transportation activities. In this context, communication issues are mainly related to the information exchange needed by the cooperation algorithms during all the phases of the mission, in particular in the coordinated transportation. Simulation results show the expected performances of the cooperative algorithm as the communication rate changes. Based on these results, a strategy to meet the requirements imposed by the cooperation and to achieve the mission objective with the available devices is presented.