ROAD project: RObotics for Assisted Diving

Abstract

The activities associated to underwater diving are of great importance in many areas. In the second half of the last century, diving technologies have greatly progressed, but diving is still characterized by significant risks, especially for professional divers who works at high depth, and limited practicability. The use of robotic systems and automatic procedures would allow, as in other situations where safety is of concern (for example, in case of hazardous works or in relation to hostile environments), a reliable monitoring and assessment of the physiological conditions of human operators during their activities. Moving from currently available technologies in underwater robotics, the ROAD (Robotics for Assisted Diving) project aims to develop an intelligent robotic system which is able to supervise in a semi-automatic way the activities performed by teams of divers. Such system will operate by monitoring a set of physiological and behavioral parameters. The collected data will be processed on-line in order to evaluate the current status and to reconstruct the evolution of the psychophysical conditions of the divers during their undertakings. The project has been founded Italian PRIN (National program of Research interest) involves two groups of experts with competence, respectively, in the physiology of diving and in the robotic technologies. The coordinator group is part of ISME (Interuniversity Center of Integrated Systems for the Marine Environment).