An Underwater Simulation Server Oriented to Cooperative Robotic Interventions: The Educational Approach

Abstract

Experiments that require the use of Supervised Autonomous Underwater Vehicles for Intervention (I-AUV) are not easy to be performed, specially when deployed in the sea or in scenarios where the robot might face lack of space and communication (e.g. interior of pipes). Also, there are some applications where the robots need to cooperate in a closed manner, for example when transporting and assembling big pipes. In fact, these two scenarios are being studied in the context of the H2020-ElPeacetolero and TWINBOT (TWIN roBOTs for cooperative underwater intervention mission) [1] projects, being necessary to have a simulation tool that offer more realistic rendering and being compatible with the real robot Application Programming Interface.This paper presents a new underwater simulation server, implemented using video game and robotic techniques, which operates by enabling the researchers control the robots in the scene in a simple and efficient manner, while using HTTP commands that have demonstrated a huge facility in the project integration process. Moreover, this simplicity has allowed the application of the simulation server in the educational context. The use of this tool has resulted to be very adequate for the students, who have used it to learn computer science and artificial intelligence algorithms to solve problems like a cooperative transportation robotic task. As case study, four educational experiments are presented, performed by master’s degree students, focusing on user interfaces, image compression for underwater channels, autonomous cooperative grasping and robot arm movement in a AUV.