Angler: An Autonomy Framework for Intervention Tasks with Lightweight Underwater Vehicle Manipulator Systems

Abstract

Developing autonomous intervention capabilities for lightweight underwater vehicle manipulator systems (UVMS) has garnered significant attention within recent years because of the opportunity for these systems to reduce intervention operating costs. Developing autonomous UVMS capabilities is challenging, however, because of the lack of available standardized software frameworks and pipelines. Previous works offer simulation environments and deployment pipelines for underwater vehicles, but fall short of providing a complete UVMS software framework. We address this gap by creating Angler: a software framework for developing localization, control, and decision-making algorithms with support for sim-to-real transfer. We validate this framework by implementing a state-of-the-art control architecture and demonstrate the ability to perform station keeping with a mean error below 0.25 m and waypoint tracking with an average final error of 0.398 m.