Yvan Petillot is joint academic lead at the National Robotarium, in Edinburgh. In this shortcast, he talks to Jon Baston-Pitt about some of the key challenges faced in controlling remotely operated vehicles (ROV) underwater.

The core problem is data transfer speeds. And that’s why researchers have turned to nature and creatures like dolphins, to understand not only how they communicate but also how they process large amounts of data in an ever changing underwater environment.

Petillot and his team have been developing sonar-based systems, and the processing to allow underwater systems to work autonomously, and are now combining them with vision systems, to allow for inspection and intervention, with sonar used as a fallback. 

Photo credit: The Ocean Agency/ Ocean image bank

Host

Jon Baston-Pitt

Guest

Yvan Petillot, Professor of Robotics and Autonomous Systems, Heriot Watt University; joint academic lead, The National Robotarium.