CADDY Project, Year 1: Overview of Technological Developments and Cooperative Behaviours

Abstract”CADDY - Cognitive Autonomous Diving Buddy” is an FP7 project that started in January 2014. Seven partner institutions have joined their efforts towards developing a cognitive underwater robotic system that will help divers during their activities in this hazardous environment. The resulting system will play a threefold role similar to those that a human buddy diver should have: buddy ’’observer”, buddy ”slave”, and buddy ”guide”. This paper gives an outline of the CADDY project results during the first year of execution. We focus only on the technical developments and cooperative behaviours that have taken place, in order to keep the overview concise and in line with the workshop topics. Special attention is given to the fleet of new and adapted autonomous marine vehicles used in the project, as well as technologies for perceiving the diver. In addition to that, we give a short overview of cooperative robotic behaviours and present initial results with autonomous surface marine vehicles tracking divers.