Autonomous systems are expected to maintain a dependable operation without human intervention. They are intended to fulfill the mission for which they were deployed, properly handling the disturbances that may affect them. Underwater robots, such as the UX-1 mine explorer developed in the UNEXMIN project, are paradigmatic examples of this need. Underwater robots are affected by both external and internal disturbances that hamper their capability for autonomous operation. Long-term autonomy requires not only the capability of perceiving and properly acting in open environments but also a sufficient degree of robustness and resilience so as to maintain and recover the operational functionality of the system when disturbed by unexpected events. In this article, we analyze the operational conditions for autonomous underwater robots with a special emphasis on the UX-1 miner explorer. We then describe a knowledge-based self-awareness and metacontrol subsystem that enables the autonomous reconfiguration of the robot subsystems to keep mission-oriented capability. This resilience augmenting solution is based on the deep modeling of the functional architecture of the autonomous robot in combination with ontological reasoning to allow self-diagnosis and reconfiguration during operation. This mechanism can transparently use robot functional redundancy to ensure mission satisfaction, even in the presence of faults.

Autonomous underwater robots, such as the UX-1 developed in the UNEXMIN project, need to maintain reliable autonomous operation in hazardous and unknown environments. Because of the lack of any kind of real-time communications with a human operated command and control station, the control architecture needs to be enhanced with mission-level self-diagnosis and self-adaptation properties an additional provided by some kind of supervisory or “metacontrol” component to ensure its reliability. In this paper, we propose an ontological implementation of such component based on Web Ontology Language (OWL) and the Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL). The solution is based on an ontology of the functional architecture of autonomous robots, which allows inferring the effects of the performance of its constituents components in the functions required during the robot mission, and generate the reconfigurations needed to maintain operation reliably. The concept solution has been validated using a hypothetical set of scenarios implemented in an OWL ontology and an OWLAPI-based reasoner, which we aim at validating by integrating the metacontrol reasoning with a realistic simulation of the underwater robot.

Planetary surface exploration is an appealing application of wireless sensor networks that has been investigated in recent years by the space community, including the European Space Agency. The idea is to deploy a number of self-organizing sensor nodes forming a wireless networked architecture to provide a distributed instrument for the study and exploration of a planetary body. To explore this concept, ESA has funded the research project RF Wireless for Planetary Exploration (RF-WIPE), carried out by GMV, SUPSI and UPM. The purpose of RF-WIPE was to simulate and prototype a wireless sensor network in order to assess the potential and limitations of the technology for the purposes of planetary exploration. In this paper, we illustrate the results of the work carried out within the context of RF-WIPE. Two test case scenarios have been investigated: a distributed sensor network-based instrument and networked planetary surface exploration. Each scenario is related to a particular network configuration. For such configurations, energy models and communication protocols have been developed, simulated, and validated both on laboratory tests and with outdoor field tests. Additionally, node deployment was investigated, and a deployment system based on a mobile robotics platform has been designed and tested.

This article presents our current work on studying energy efficient locomotion on crawling snake-like robots. The aim of this work is to use existing biological inspired methods to demonstrate lateral undulation planar gaits for efficiently controlling high-speed motion as a function of the terrain surface. A multilink non-wheeled snake-like robot is being developed for experimentation and analysis of efficient serpentine locomotion based on simulation results.