PLENARY LECTURE

TITLE: Marine Robotics: From Theory to Practice

By António M. Pascoal
Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR) and
Department of Electrical Engineering and Computers of the
Instituto Superior Técnico (IST)
ISR-IST, Torre Norte
Av. Rovisco Pais, 1 1049-001 Lisbon, Portugal
email: antonio@isr.ist.utl.pt
http://www.isr.ist.utl.pt

SUMMARY: Worldwide, there is currently great interest in fostering initiatives that aim at bridging the gap between marine science and technology by exploring fruitful collaboration links between engineers and marine scientists, namely biologists, geologists, and oceanographers. This symbiosis is instrumental in providing engineers with complex, challenging problems in the field of marine robotics. Conversely, it will provide marine scientists with ever increasingly complex technologies to explore the ocean frontier, especially in hazardous conditions.

This talk will focus on the interplay between theory and practice in marine robotics. The first part of the talk will provide a quick overview of the marine robotics field and highlight scientific and commercial applications. This will be followed by the description of challenging problems in Navigation, Guidance, and Control (NGC) that arise in the process of developing marine robots that must perform reliably at sea. Key concepts and classical as well as newly emerging design techniques in NGC will be summarized. The final part of the talk will provide the bridge between concept and practice. Hardware and software architectures for algorithm implementation on existing prototypes of surface and underwater robots developed at the Institute for Systems and Robotics (ISR, pole of Lisbon) will be presented. Videos will show actual operations at sea.