I-AUV docking and intervention in a subsea panel

Palomeras, Narcís, Peñalver, Antonio, Massot-Campos, Miquel, Vallicrosa, Guillem, Negre, Pep Lluís, Fernández, J. Javier, Ridao, Pere, Sanz, Pedro J., Oliver-Codina, Gabriel and Palomer, Albert (2014) I-AUV docking and intervention in a subsea panel. In, IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. (IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems) International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (14/09/14 - 18/09/14) IEEE, pp. 2279-2285. (doi:10.1109/IROS.2014.6942870).

Abstract

While commercially available autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are routinely used in survey missions, a new set of applications exist which clearly demand intervention capabilities: the maintenance of permanent underwater structures as well as the recovery of benthic stations or black-boxes are a few of them. These tasks are addressed nowadays using manned submersibles or work-class remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), equipped with teleoperated arms under human supervision. In the context of the TRITON Spanish funded project, a subsea panel docking and an intervention procedure are proposed. The light-weight intervention AUV (I-AUV) Girona 500 is used to autonomously dock into a subsea panel using a funnel-based docking method for passive accommodation. Once docked, an autonomous fixed-based manipulation system, which uses feedback from a digital camera, is used to turn a valve and plug/unplug a connector. The paper presents the techniques used for the autonomous docking and manipulation as well as how the adapted subsea panel has been designed to facilitate such operations.

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Contributors

Author: Miquel Massot-Campos

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