Colloquium "Robots Assisting Divers - the FP7 CADDY project"

Abstract:
Divers operate in harsh and poorly monitored environments in which the slightest unexpected disturbance, technical malfunction, or lack of attention can have catastrophic consequences. They manoeuvre in complex 3D environments, carry cumbersome equipment, while performing their mission. To overcome these problems, CADDY aims to establish an innovative set-up between a diver and companion autonomous robots (underwater and surface) that exhibit cognitive behaviour through learning, interpreting, and adapting to the diver’s behaviour, physical state, and actions. The CADDY project replaces a human buddy diver with an autonomous underwater vehicle and adds a new autonomous surface vehicle to improve monitoring, assistance, and safety of the diver’s mission. The resulting system plays a threefold role similar to those that a human buddy diver should have: the buddy “observer” that continuously monitors the diver; the buddy “slave” that is the diver's “extended hand” during underwater operations performing tasks such as “do a mosaic of that area”, “take a photo of that” or “illuminate that”; and the buddy “guide” that leads the diver through the underwater environment. This talk will focus on the CADDY project objectives and some recent results. In addition, the speaker will present some novel interesting results obtained in other ongoing projects within the Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies at the UNIZG-FER.

CV:

Nikola Mišković is an assistant professor at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing where he teaches control engineering related courses. He is a project coordinator of FP7 CADDY - Cognitive Autonomous Diving Buddy and he was a coordinator of a national funded project “Autonomous surface platform for diver navigation and monitoring”. He was also involved in FP7 CURE, FP7 CART, NATO-NURC collaboration project and FP7 EUROFLEETS2 project. He was a visiting researcher at Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, ISSIA, Genova, Italy in 2008. He is a member of the IEEE Oceanic Engineering Society, the European Embedded Control Institute and the Association for Unmanned Vehicle Systems International. He is the author of 2 book chapters and more than 30 papers in journals and international conferences. His research interests include mathematical modelling, cooperative guidance, control and navigation of marine vessels (surface and underwater), nonlinear control theory and its applications in marine robotics.