Research on Cooperative Operation Control Methods for ROVs and AUVs in Constrained Waters

The collaborative operation of remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) has been widely applied in the field of ocean engineering. However, there are still some issues: high latency in underwater acoustic communication, which cannot guarantee stable transmission of high-bandwidth data; erratic movement of ROV cables, leading to collision problems during the collaborative process between ROVs and AUVs; and difficulty in maintaining specific positions and orientations during collaborative operations, resulting in low operational efficiency. To address these issues, a new improvement method is proposed: adopting an underwater adaptive communication method to achieve high-bandwidth data transmission between ROVs and AUVs; adding connecting cables between ROVs and AUVs, and adopting a vision-based collision avoidance method; using an inertial measurement unit integrated with vision for pose registration between ROVs and AUVs. Experimental results show that this method reduces the time required to perform the same task by 25.67% compared to traditional schemes, providing a guarantee for the widespread application of collaborative control of underwater robots in the future.