On February 24th 2021, researchers from the Interuniversity Center of Integrated Systems for the Marine Environment (ISME), Università degli Studi di Cassino e del Lazio Meridionale (UNICAS) run remote experiments with Girona500 AUV in the water tank of the Underwater Robotics Research Center (CIRS) from the Computer Vision and Robotics Institute (VICOROB) of Universitat de Girona (UdG).
The collaboration started in the framework of EUMarineRobotics (EUMR) European project under WP4, T4.1 Exchange of personnel. Initially the researchers from ISME-UNICAS planned to come to Girona for a full week of experiments. However, due to COVID restrictions the experiments were delayed until they were reformulated as remote experiments.
Researchers from ISME-UNICAS started with a Matlab implementation of the controllers that they wanted to test on the AUV. Following that, the system was tested in Stonefish simulator with the whole software architecture of Girona500 AUV. The designed controller was adaptive with respect to the persistent dynamic parameters of the AUV, thus a preliminary procedure for their identification was needed before the real experiments. The needed data was gathered in the water tank, and then processed in order to acquire an initial estimation of the required parameters. Finally, the experiments were run on the water tank while the researchers from both institutions communicated via telcon and were able to see remotely the results obtained.