9 accepted papers
Underwater Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) exchange data with a control station via a communication cable. One or more intermediate robots can be placed along this tether to manage its shape and minimize the mechanical effects on the ROV. This work deals with the localization of a pair of underwat…
This paper examines the relevance of using catenary-based curves to model cables in underwater tethered robotic applications in order to take into account the influence of hydrodynamic damping. To this end, an augmented catenary-based model is introduced to deal with the dynamical effects of surge m…
This study is twofold. First, a comprehensive simulation framework of cable dynamics is introduced. This framework considers variable length cables and allows to incorporate elements such as buoys, ballast or Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors. The accuracy of this framework is assessed through…
This letter focuses on categorizing diver gestures by analyzing angle features extracted from the movements of their upper limbs without exploiting information encoded by the hands, as is generally the case in the literature. Our approach is intended to be as generic as possible, in order to enable
The papers in this special section focus on robotic handling of deformable objects. Object handling and manipulation is a recurrent theme in robotics, moving progressively from simple rigid objects to articulated objects and then complex deformable objects. In recent years, there has been a growing
Some recent visual-based relocalization algorithms rely on deep learning methods to perform camera pose regression from image data. This letter focuses on the loss functions that embed the error between two poses to perform deep learning based camera pose regression. Existing loss functions are eith
This paper presents a new experimental method for the estimation of hydrodynamic parameters of underwater vehicles, namely the added mass and drag coefficients. The principle is to accurately record the movement of the vehicle in response to a known time-varying actuating force, and find an optimal
This paper deals with the estimation of the shape of a catenary for a negatively buoyant cable, connecting a pair of underwater robots in a robot chain. The new estimation method proposed here is based on the calculation of local tangents thanks to the data acquired from inertial measurement units (…
Tethers are used to supply power and transfer data for teleoperated robots. They are known to limit the robot's workspace and could have the effect of hampering its motion. What if we could take advantage of the tether? In this paper a new visual servoing scheme for catenary shaped deformable object…