Mission Planning and Safety Assessment for Pipeline Inspection Using Autonomous Underwater Vehicles: A Framework based on Behavior Trees

The recent advance in autonomous underwater robotics facilitates autonomous inspection tasks of offshore infrastructure. However, current inspection missions rely on predefined plans created offline, hampering the flexibility and autonomy of the inspection vehicle and the mission's success in case of unexpected events. In this work, we address these challenges by proposing a framework encompassing the modeling and verification of mission plans through Behavior Trees (BTs). This framework leverages the modularity of BTs to model onboard reactive behaviors, thus enabling autonomous plan executions, and uses BehaVerify to verify the mission's safety. Moreover, as a use case of this framework, we present a novel AI-enabled algorithm that aims for efficient, autonomous pipeline camera data collection. In a simulated environment, we demonstrate the framework's application to our proposed pipeline inspection algorithm. Our framework marks a significant step forward in the field of autonomous underwater robotics, promising to enhance the safety and success of underwater missions in practical, real-world applications. https://github.com/remaro-network/pipe_inspection_mission

SubPipe: A Submarine Pipeline Inspection Dataset for Segmentation and Visual-inertial Localization

This paper presents SubPipe, an underwater dataset for SLAM, object detection, and image segmentation. SubPipe has been recorded using a \gls{LAUV}, operated by OceanScan MST, and carrying a sensor suite including two cameras, a side-scan sonar, and an inertial navigation system, among other sensors. The AUV has been deployed in a pipeline inspection environment with a submarine pipe partially covered by sand. The AUV's pose ground truth is estimated from the navigation sensors. The side-scan sonar and RGB images include object detection and segmentation annotations, respectively. State-of-the-art segmentation, object detection, and SLAM methods are benchmarked on SubPipe to demonstrate the dataset's challenges and opportunities for leveraging computer vision algorithms. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first annotated underwater dataset providing a real pipeline inspection scenario. The dataset and experiments are publicly available online at https://github.com/remaro-network/SubPipe-dataset

UNav-Sim: A Visually Realistic Underwater Robotics Simulator and Synthetic Data-generation Framework

Underwater robotic surveys can be costly due to the complex working environment and the need for various sensor modalities. While underwater simulators are essential, many existing simulators lack sufficient rendering quality, restricting their ability to transfer algorithms from simulation to real-world applications. To address this limitation, we introduce UNav-Sim, which, to the best of our knowledge, is the first simulator to incorporate the efficient, high-detail rendering of Unreal Engine 5 (UE5). UNav-Sim is open-source and includes an autonomous vision-based navigation stack. By supporting standard robotics tools like ROS, UNav-Sim enables researchers to develop and test algorithms for underwater environments efficiently.