Underwater Robotics

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are increasingly used to survey coral reefs, yet efficiently locating specific coral species of interest remains difficult: target species are often sparsely distributed across the reef, and an AUV with limited battery life cannot afford to search everywhere. When detections of the target itself are too sparse to provide directional guidance, the robot benefits from an additional signal to decide where to look next. We propose using the visual environmental context -- the habitat features that tend to co-occur with a target species -- as that signal. Because context features are spatially denser and often vary more smoothly than target detections, we hypothesize that a reward function targeted at broader environmental context will enable adaptive planners to make better decisions on where to go next, even in regions where no target has yet been observed. Starting from a single labeled image, our method uses patch-level DINOv2 embeddings to perform one-shot detections of both the target species and its surrounding context online. We validate our approach using real imagery collected by an AUV at two reef sites in St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands, simulating the robot's motion offline. Our results demonstrate that one-shot detection combined with adaptive context modeling enables efficient autonomous surveying, sampling up to 75$\%$ of the target in roughly half the time required by exhaustive coverage when the target is sparsely distributed, and outperforming search strategies that only use target detections.

Underwater robots are widely deployed for ocean exploration and manipulation. Underactuated mechanisms are advantageous in aquatic environments because reducing actuator count lowers motor-leakage risk while introducing inherent mechanical compliance. However, accurate modeling of underwater underactuated and soft robotic systems remains challenging, as it requires identifying high-dimensional structural and hydrodynamic parameters. In this work, we propose a trajectory-driven global optimization framework for unified structural-hydrodynamic modeling of underwater multibody systems. Inspired by the Covariance Matrix Adaptation Evolution Strategy (CMA-ES), the proposed approach simultaneously identifies coupled elastic, damping, and distributed hydrodynamic parameters through trajectory-level matching between simulated and experimental motion. This enables high-fidelity reproduction of underactuated mechanisms and compliant soft robotic systems in underwater environments, using as little as a single video recording. We first validate the framework on a link-by-link underactuated multibody mechanism, demonstrating accurate identification of distributed hydrodynamic coefficients, with normalized end-effector position error below 5% across multiple trajectories, initial conditions, and both active-passive and fully passive configurations. The modeling strategy is further validated on an asymmetric octopus-inspired soft arm, confirming its effectiveness for compliant soft robotic systems. Finally, eight identified arms are assembled into a swimming octopus robot, where the unified parameter set enables realistic whole-body behavior without additional retuning. These results demonstrate the scalability and transferability of the proposed structural-hydrodynamic modeling framework across underwater underactuated and soft robotic systems.

Field robotics research in maritime and space domains is constrained by a persistent gap between low-cost, low-fidelity simulation and costly offshore experimentation. Instrumented water tanks partially bridge this gap but often provide limited sensing, restricted experimental capabilities, and weak integration with simulation tools. To address these limitations, we present Marinarium, a modular, standalone experimental facility that provides a cost-effective intermediate testbed between simulation and field deployment. Marinarium combines a fully instrumented underwater and aerial operational volume with motion capture (MoCap), a retractable roof enabling both sheltered and open-air operation, a digital twin implemented in SMaRCSim, and direct integration with a planar space robotics laboratory, enabling both maritime and underwater space-analog experimentation. We present the design rationale of the facility and validate its capabilities through four representative studies in field robotics: (i) data-driven system identification of underwater vehicle dynamics; (ii) heterogeneous multi-domain robotic rendezvous; (iii) sim-to-real transfer for underwater robotics using learned dynamics residuals; and (iv) cross-domain validation of spacecraft autonomy using underwater surrogates. Together, these studies demonstrate that Marinarium enables reproducible, instrumented experimentation across multiple field robotics challenges that would otherwise require costly offshore deployments or be impractical to investigate using simulation alone.

Localization and mapping are core perceptual capabilities for underwater robots. Stereo cameras provide a low-cost means of directly estimating metric depth to support these tasks. However, despite recent advances in stereo depth estimation on land, computing depth from image pairs in underwater scenes remains challenging. In underwater environments, images are degraded by light attenuation, visual artifacts, and dynamic lighting conditions. Furthermore, real-world underwater scenes frequently lack rich texture useful for stereo depth estimation and 3D reconstruction. As a result, stereo estimation networks trained on in-air data cannot transfer directly to the underwater domain. In addition, there is a lack of real-world underwater stereo datasets for supervised training of neural networks. Poor underwater depth estimation is compounded in stereo-based Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms, making it a fundamental challenge for underwater robot perception. To address these challenges, we propose a novel framework that enables sim-to-real training of underwater stereo disparity estimation networks using simulated data and self-supervised finetuning. We leverage our learned depth predictions to develop SurfSLAM, a novel framework for real-time underwater SLAM that fuses stereo cameras with IMU, barometric, and Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) measurements. Lastly, we collect a challenging real-world dataset of shipwreck surveys using an underwater robot. Our dataset features over 24,000 stereo pairs, along with high-quality, dense photogrammetry models and reference trajectories for evaluation. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate the advantages of the proposed training approach on real-world data for improving stereo estimation in the underwater domain and for enabling accurate trajectory estimation and 3D reconstruction of complex shipwreck sites.

Holonomic autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have the hardware ability for agile maneuvering in both translational and rotational degrees of freedom (DOFs). However, due to challenges inherent to underwater vehicles, such as complex hydrostatics and hydrodynamics, parametric uncertainties, and frequent changes in dynamics due to payload changes, control is challenging. Performance typically relies on carefully tuned controllers targeting unique platform configurations, and a need for re-tuning for deployment under varying payloads and hydrodynamic conditions. As a consequence, agile maneuvering with simultaneous tracking of time-varying references in both translational and rotational DOFs is rarely utilized in practice. To the best of our knowledge, this paper presents the first general zero-shot sim2real deep reinforcement learning-based (DRL) velocity controller enabling path following and agile 6DOF maneuvering with a training duration of just 3 minutes. Sim2Swim, the proposed approach, inspired by state-of-the-art DRL-based position control, leverages domain randomization and massively parallelized training to converge to field-deployable control policies for AUVs of variable characteristics without post-processing or tuning. Sim2Swim is extensively validated in pool trials for a variety of configurations, showcasing robust control for highly agile motions.

The safe deployment of autonomous systems in safety-critical settings requires a paradigm that combines human expertise with AI-driven analysis, especially when anomalies are unforeseen. We introduce AURA (Autonomous Resilience Agent), a collaborative framework for anomaly and fault diagnostics in robotics. AURA integrates large language models (LLMs), a high-fidelity digital twin (DT), and human-in-the-loop interaction to detect and respond to anomalous behavior in real time. The architecture uses two agents with clear roles: (i) a low-level State Anomaly Characterization Agent that monitors telemetry and converts signals into a structured natural-language problem description, and (ii) a high-level Diagnostic Reasoning Agent that conducts a knowledge-grounded dialogue with an operator to identify root causes, drawing on external sources. Human-validated diagnoses are then converted into new training examples that refine the low-level perceptual model. This feedback loop progressively distills expert knowledge into the AI, transforming it from a static tool into an adaptive partner. We describe the framework's operating principles and provide a concrete implementation, establishing a pattern for trustworthy, continually improving human-robot teams.

The calibration of extrinsic parameters and clock offsets between sensors for high-accuracy performance in underwater SLAM systems remains insufficiently explored. Existing methods for Doppler Velocity Log (DVL) calibration are either constrained to specific sensor configurations or rely on oversimplified assumptions, and none jointly estimate translational extrinsics and time offsets. We propose a Unified Iterative Calibration (UIC) framework for general DVL sensor setups, formulated as a Maximum A Posteriori (MAP) estimation with a Gaussian Process (GP) motion prior for high-fidelity motion interpolation. UIC alternates between efficient GP-based motion state updates and gradient-based calibration variable updates, supported by a provably statistically consistent sequential initialization scheme. The proposed UIC can be applied to IMU, cameras and other modalities as co-sensors. We release an open-source DVL-camera calibration toolbox. Beyond underwater applications, several aspects of UIC-such as the integration of GP priors for MAP-based calibration and the design of provably reliable initialization procedures-are broadly applicable to other multi-sensor calibration problems. Finally, simulations and real-world tests validate our approach.