Assistive Control Framework for Remotely Operated Vehicles

The paper presents a control framework aimed at supporting a human operator in the guidance and in the coordination of an underwater Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV). Due to environmental conditions and operational scenarios, underwater tele-operations can be very demanding. Thus, a very high experience can be required to the operator that, by providing commands to each actuator, has to successfully perform the assigned task without damaging the vehicle. In this sense, a control algorithm that can help the operator in performing the assigned task may represent a system support element able to ensure the vehicle safety. Based on a survey realized with professional ROV pilots, in this paper we propose a framework that allows the human operator to send position commands to the ROV by a joystick and to set different tasks through a dedicated user-friendly interface. The tasks are managed via a control algorithm represented by a closed loop inverse kinematic algorithm able to manage multiple both equality-based and set-based tasks. The overall framework has been developed in the Robot Operating System (ROS) environment and numerically tested using Gazebo environment.