Overview of the FP7 project “CADDY — Cognitive Autonomous Diving Buddy”

This paper summarizes the main accomplishments of the first year of the FP7 project “CADDY — Cognitive Autonomous Diving Buddy”. The main objective of the project is to replace a human buddy diver with an autonomous underwater vehicle and add an autonomous surface vehicle to improve monitoring, assistance, and safety of the diver's mission. While all envisioned objectives of the project are listed, the paper focuses on the results that were obtained in the following areas of research: development of the multicomponent robotic system, “Seeing the Diver” (underwater perception), “Understanding the Diver” (cognition in the form of interpreting diver sign language, behaviour and physiological parameters), and diver-robot cooperation and control.