This paper presents the system design, sea trials and Antartic exploitation of the SESAMO platform. The SESAMO (sea surface autonomous modular unit) prototype robot was especially designed to collect data and samples for the study of the sea-air interface. At sea, operations showed that a relatively simple robot could satisfactorily work in a natural, outdoor environment, dramatically facilitating the job of the human operator. To achieve high quality sampling of the surface microlayer, however, requires a large amount of time, leading to significant demands on logistics resources, mainly in terms of operating time of the support vessel.

Autonomous underwater vehicles are frequently used for survey missions and monitoring tasks, however, manipulation and intervention tasks are still largely performed with a human in the loop. Employing autonomous vehicles for these tasks has received a growing interest in the last ten years, and few pioneering projects have been funded on this topic. Among these projects, the Italian MARIS project had the goal of developing technologies and methodologies for the use of autonomous underwater vehicle manipulator systems in underwater manipulation and transportation tasks. This work presents the developed control framework, the mechatronic integration, and the project’s final experimental results on floating underwater intervention.

Virtual target-based path-following techniques are extended to execute the task of vehicle following in the case of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs). Indeed, vehicle following is reduced to the problem of tracking a virtual target moving at a desired range from a master vessel, while separating the spatial and temporal constraints, giving priority to the former one. The proposed approach is validated experimentally in a harbor area with the help of the prototype USVs ALANIS and Charlie, developed by Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche-Istituto di Studi sui Sistemi Intelligenti per lAutomazione (CNR-ISSIA).