Underwater Robot Manipulation: Advances, Challenges and Prospective Ventures
It addresses the problem of achieving autonomous manipulation for underwater robots in dynamic marine environments, but is incremental as it reviews existing work and proposes future directions.
This manuscript discusses the challenges in underwater robot manipulation, such as environmental disturbances and perception issues, and highlights research directions to improve autonomy, without presenting new experimental results or concrete numbers.
Underwater manipulation is one of the most remarkable ongoing research subjects in robotics. \acp{I-AUV} not only have to cope with the technical challenges associated with traditional manipulation tasks but do so while currents and waves perturb the stability of the vehicle, and low-light, turbid water conditions impede perceiving the surroundings. Certainly, the dynamic nature and our limited understanding of the marine environment hinder the autonomous performance of underwater robot manipulation. This manuscript provides a discussion on previous research and the limiting factors that impose on the long-envisioned prospects of autonomous underwater manipulation to finally highlight research directions that have the potential to improve the autonomy capabilities of I-AUV.