Coordinated Navigation of Surface and Underwater Marine Robotic Vehicles for Ocean Sampling and Environmental Monitoring

Water pollution generated by accidental spill of hazardous materials is a growing problem worldwide. There is an urgent need for a tool that would help environmental response teams perform rapid understanding of the location and the extent of the spill to effectively establish an appropriate response. This paper presents a cooperative robotic system for environmental monitoring consisting of an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) and an autonomous unmanned surface vehicle (USV). The main contributions of the paper are a systematic description of the design and implementation of the proposed cooperative robotic system, a novel human-on-the-loop (HOTL) approach applied on the system for environmental monitoring, and demonstration of the results of the open-sea experiments on pollution deliberately caused by harmless Rhodamine water tracing (WT), carried out in Cartagena, Spain, in June 2015. The proposed HOTL system provides near real-time pollution measurement data, while not consuming a significant amount of human time and effort. It supports decision-making and allows the operator to initiate the most adequate mission in a current situation, i.e., ensures mission change on-the-fly. While the AUV samples the ocean, the USV maintains the localization and communication data transfer to the control center and corrects the AUV's dead reckoning error.