Autonomous Deep Sea Mining Exploration: The EU ROBUST Project Control Framework

This paper presents the control framework developed within the Horizon 2020 ROBUST project aimed at building an autonomous system for exploring deep sea mining sites. First, the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle analyzes the initial zone of interest with the aim of finding a sub area with the highest probability to contain a manganese nodule field. When such an area is found, a low altitude survey is performed. When a possible nodule is detected, the vehicle lands on the seafloor, allowing a dedicated sensor mounted on the manipulator's end-effector to perform the nodule analysis. This work presents the ROBUST control framework and the task priority based kinematic used for its implementation. In addition, software in the loop simulation, dry and pool test results are shown to validate the control framework addressed.