IEEE Robotics & Automation Magazine - December 2018 - 98

History

Interview with Junku Yuh,
Principal Investigator of the SAUVIM Project
Matteo Fumagalli and Enrico Simetti

T

he following is an interview
conducted for IEEE Robotics
and Automation Magazine
(RAM) with Dr. Junku Yuh,
director of the Robotics and Media
Institute at the Korea Institute of Science
and Technology, Seoul. Dr. Yuh was the
principal investigator of the Semi-
autonomous Underwater Vehicle for
Intervention Missions (SAUVIM) project,
which achieved an important milestone
in underwater robotics' history: the first
demonstration of autonomous under-
water floating
manipulation.
The main goal
RAM: What do
of the SAUVIM
you consider to
project, funded by
be the main
founding goals
the U.S. Office of
of the SAUVIM
Naval Research,
project? What
are the possible
was to develop a
markets and
semiautonomous
app l i c at i on s
where the tech-
underwater vehicle
nology devel-
for intervention
oped within
SAUVIM could
missions.
be exploited?
Junku Yuh:
The main goal of the SAUVIM project,
funded by the U.S. Office of Naval
Research, was to develop a semiautono-
mous underwater vehicle for interven-
tion missions. Three organizations
worked together to achieve this goal:
the Autonomous Systems Laboratory of
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MRA.2018.2870988
Date of publication: 12 December 2018

98

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IEEE ROBOTICS & AUTOMATION MAGAZINE

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the University of Hawaii, Marine
Autonomous System Engineering,
Inc., and Naval Undersea Warfare
Center, Newport.
The SAUVIM is equipped with
autonomous underwater manipulation
capability that can support diverse
ocean-related activities-aquaculture,
commercial fishing, ocean research,
seafood marketing, ocean recreation,
marine mining, marine biotechnology,
and ocean energy. Living and nonliving
resources of the ocean are abundant.
For example, it is estimated that there
are about 2,000 billion tons of manga-
nese nodules at the bottom of the Pacif-
ic Ocean. The ocean also plays a critical
role in global environmental issues such
as pollution and carbon cycles, with the
ocean retaining more heat than the
atmosphere. Therefore, it is not difficult
to predict that the ocean will have a
great effect on the future existence of all
human beings, and underwater systems
like SAUVIM would be a necessity in
fully exploring the ocean.
This goal was established because
many underwater intervention tasks
are today performed using manned
submersibles or remotely operated
vehicles in teleoperation mode. Auton-
omous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are
mostly employed in survey applica-
tions. In fact, the low bandwidth and
significant time delay inherent in
acoustic subsea communications repre-
sent a considerable obstacle for remote-
ly operating a manipulation system,
making it impossible for remote con-
trollers to react to problems in a timely
manner. Nevertheless, vehicles with no

december 2018

physical link and with no human occu-
pants permit intervention in dangerous
areas, such as in deep ocean, under ice,
in missions to retrieve hazardous
objects, or in classified areas. The key
element in underwater intervention
performed with autonomous vehicles is
autonomous manipulation, which
refers to the capability of a robot system
that performs intervention tasks
requiring physical contacts in unstruc-
tured environments without continu-
ous human supervision.
Only a few AUVs are equipped with
manipulators. SAUVIM, at its current
state of the art, is one of the very first
underwater vehicles designed to per-
form autonomous manipulation tasks.
RAM: What are some of the major sci-
entific and technological challenges you
encountered in the SAUVIM project-
specifically, in relation to floating
manipulation?
Yuh: The autonomous manipulation
system on SAUVIM, unlike teleoperat-
ed manipulation systems controlled by
human operators with the aid of visual
and other sensory feedback, must be
capable of assessing a situation, includ-
ing self-calibration based on sensory
information, and executing or revising a
course of manipulating action without
continuous human intervention.
Instead of directly operating the
manipulator, the SAUVIM user may pro-
vide higher-level commands during a
particular mission, such as "unplug the
connector." In this approach, the function
of the operator is to decide, after analysis
of the data, which particular task the
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