Research Projects

There is a growing demand for unmanned underwater robots as marine researchers are eager to explore the ocean's resources. Remotely Operated Underwater Vehicles (ROVs) are currently one of the best state-of-the-art available for intervention applications. However, unlike their land or air counterparts, ROVs lack advanced sensors and communication capabilities that could provide visual cues to the operator. Thus, operators must rely heavily on visual feedback gathered from depth sensors, inertial sensors and sonars. Unfortunately, limited and fluctuating visual feedback can negatively impact the operator's ability to comprehend the ROV's underwater environment and maneuver the vehicle. Research has been conducted to improve the visual feedback and address this challenge by incorporating additional information about the underwater environment. Virtual Reality (VR) technology has also been employed to enhance the operator's understanding of the ROV's pose. However, this approach increases the operator's cognitive workload and dependence on the visual feedback channel while maintaining a specific orientation. Similarly, this approach still in research level due to the lack of information for spatiotemporal scales. Moreover, these methods may not be effective for ROV operations occurring in diverse and complex workspaces. Thus, considering the above criteria, this research aims to incorporate haptic feedback into the UVMS control, allowing the operator to feel the impact of environmental disturbances such as waves, water currents, and drag force on its pose. It is one of the first instances of developing high-fidelity underwater teleoperation of a UVMS for deep-sea intervention environments using haptics as per the proposers' knowledge.