HyDrone is a technology program to develop new concept underwater vehicles, highly reconfigurable with different payloads, expected to carry out underwater missions at different degrees of autonomy and to operate resident underwater without maintenance for up to two years. Typical missions range from geographically restricted inspections and operations on wells, pipelines and processing systems (using wired communication and power), to medium range missions (based on underwater wifi communication and battery power), to long-range missions.
AI planning techniques may help to overcome several problems like:
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Management of system resources even in abnormal or unexpected conditions happening during mission execution
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Management of critical/abnormal situations that may lead to damage or risks in general
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Making the mission’s definition independent from specific field, so allowing to develop a much more general code in the lowest levels of the architecture (improving reusability, testability and development of additional features for the system and not for a specific scenario)
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Allow planning missions that foresee use of manipulator and tools in general in a seamless way with the rest of the mission
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Exploiting opportunities that may not be exploited by standard, rigid plans programmed by humans
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Help in validating missions proposed/developed by humans