AI-Driven Marine Robotics: Emerging Trends in Underwater Perception and Ecosystem Monitoring
This work addresses scalable monitoring of marine ecosystems under climate change, highlighting a paradigm shift in AI-driven intervention capabilities.
The paper examines how underwater AI is evolving from a niche application into a catalyst for innovation, driven by environmental monitoring needs and unique challenges like turbidity and species detection, leading to advances in weakly supervised learning and robust perception.
Marine ecosystems face increasing pressure due to climate change, driving the need for scalable, AI-powered monitoring solutions. This paper examines the rapid emergence of underwater AI as a major research frontier and analyzes the factors that have transformed marine perception from a niche application into a catalyst for AI innovation. We identify three convergent drivers: environmental necessity for ecosystem-scale monitoring, democratization of underwater datasets through citizen science platforms, and researcher migration from saturated terrestrial computer vision domains. Our analysis reveals how unique underwater challenges - turbidity, cryptic species detection, expert annotation bottlenecks, and cross-ecosystem generalization - are driving fundamental advances in weakly supervised learning, open-set recognition, and robust perception under degraded conditions. We survey emerging trends in datasets, scene understanding and 3D reconstruction, highlighting the paradigm shift from passive observation toward AI-driven, targeted intervention capabilities. The paper demonstrates how underwater constraints are pushing the boundaries of foundation models, self-supervised learning, and perception, with methodological innovations that extend far beyond marine applications to benefit general computer vision, robotics, and environmental monitoring.