Net inspection in fish-farm cages is a daily task for divers. This task represents a high cost for fish farms and is a high-risk activity for human operators. The total inspection surface can be more than 1500 m, which means that this activity is time-consuming. Taking into account the severe restrictions for human operators in such hostile underwater conditions, this activity represents a significant area for improvement. A platform for net inspection is proposed in this work. This platform includes a surface vehicle, a ground control station, and an underwater vehicle (BlueROV2 heavy) which incorporates artificial intelligence, trajectory control procedures, and the necessary communications. In this platform, computer vision was integrated, involving a convolutional neural network trained to predict the distance between the net and the robot. Additionally, an object detection algorithm was developed to recognize holes in the net. Furthermore, a simulation environment was established to evaluate the inspection trajectory algorithms. Tests were also conducted to evaluate how underwater wireless communications perform in this underwater scenario. Experimental results about the hole detection, net distance estimation, and the inspection trajectories demonstrated robustness, usability, and viability of the proposed methodology. The experimental validation took place in the CIRTESU tank, which has dimensions of 12 × 8 × 5 m, at Universitat Jaume I.
In this work, we consider a generalized version of the adversarial model and study the universal stability (stability in any network) of scheduling policies under low load rates. We show that any work-conserving policy is universally stable at any load rate r<(1/d), where d is the largest number of links crossed by any packet. We also show that system-wide time priority policies are universally stable at any load rate r<(1/(d-1)).