A general agreement to collaborate with the CERN research center in developing robots able to operate in the difficult access tunels in CERN subterranean instalations, especially in the Large Hadron Collider.
This is a very difficult environment in which to operate, as there are space restrictions, bad light conditions and strong electromagnetical fields.
As part of the agreement there is a join PhD between CERN and Jaume I University (with two students in 2019).
TWIN roBOTs for cooperative underwater intervention missions: 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 observatories, submerged oil wells, cabled sensor networks, pipes and the deployment and recovery of benthic stations are but a few of them. Nowadays, these tasks are addressed using manned submersibles or work-class ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicle), equipped with teleoperated arms.
The IRS-Lab coordinates a consortium with two other UJI laboratories, Ingeniería del Diseño and Mecánica de Fluidos, and the CSIC-Centro de Investigaciones Marinas de Torreblanca to create a Research Center in Robotics and Submarine Technologies (CIRTESU).
This center will have their own aquatic instalations thanks to a FEDER grant (IDIFEDER/2018/013) inside the Jaume I University campus.
The main objective of the project is to advance the state of the art of underwater robotics applied to interventions in archaeological sites. Thus, on the one hand, the semi-autonomous manipulation capacity in scenarios with occlusion of objects is being investigated, and on the other hand the improvement of the wireless communications system and the compression of images, in a way that allows (if necessary) the mobility of the submarine vehicle without umbilical. In addition, supervised control by the remote operator will be allowed, taking into account the restrictions of the network.
MERBOTS aims at progressing in the underwater intervention systems development. To that end, we plan an extensive use of multirobot cooperation and multimodal perception systems. Nowadays, when the mission area is too deep and risky to be carried out by divers, the alternative consists in using remotely operated vehicles (ROV). This is a difficult and expensive solution requiring sophisticated support infrastructure and specialized personnel.
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