Visual-haptic feedback for ROV subsea navigation control

• Published in: Automation in construction Vol. 154; p. 104987
• Main Authors: Xia, Pengxiang, You, Hengxu, Du, Jing
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier B.V 01-10-2023
• Subjects: Remotely operated vehicles; Sensory augmentation; Subsea construction; Virtual reality; Remotely operated vehicles; Subsea construction; Sensory augmentation; Virtual reality
• ISSN: 0926-5805; 1872-7891
• DOI: 10.1016/j.autcon.2023.104987

Subsea engineering operations, including subsea inspection, installation and maintenance, heavily rely on the seamless interaction between remotely operated vehicles (ROV) and human operators. Subsea ROV control has always been a great challenge to human operators due to the dynamics of the subsea environment such as uncertainty of turbulence, affected visibility and interference with subsea ecosystems. Compared to engineering work on the ground, subsea engineering tasks are usually finished in a limited vision field with drift and localization problems. However, the traditional ROV feedback system, the live video streaming, cannot provide direct and intuitive perceptions of remote ROV workspace as well as a clear indication of the workspace uncertainties. Therefore, this research proposes a Virtual Reality augmented visual feedback system with haptic simulators to generate immersive, intuitive and effective feedback for human operators. The system can generate visual and haptic feedback as indications of flow conditions based on sensory data. A human subject experiment was performed to verify the effectiveness of this system. The result indicated that this system could significantly assist human operators in precepting the flow conditions in the ROV workspace in a more immersive and intuitive way.
•A new underwater robot (ROV) teleoperation method based on telepresence and sensory augmentation.•A haptic system with 40 vibrators is programed to transfer feelings of hydrodynamic features to human operators.•A human-subject experiment (N = 30) was proposed to test the proposed system in ROV navigation.•Results show a significant improvement of performance and perception.