Manipulation in the Seabed: A New Underwater Manipulation System for Shallow Water Intervention

In this paper the hardware architecture of a new Underwater Manipulation System is presented, which includes details about the design of the mechanical components, as well as the electronics that control the manipulation tasks, such as the PC104 ROS (Robotic Operating System) enabled server, an Arduino manager of the power consumption of the arm, and an underwater camera included in the visual servoing loop for manipulation.The manipulation system is integrated into the Girona 500 AUV, providing a complete system that can be operated via a network from the ground base station. The paper describes this system architecture, which is the purpose of the ongoing FP7 TRIDENT project. Further work will focus of extending the experiments to a more realistic scenario in the sea. At the moment of writing the scientific team is performing this integration in the northern coast of Spain.