Autonomous Underwater Vehicles are frequently used for survey missions and monitoring tasks, however manipulation and intervention tasks are still largely performed with a human in the loop.Employing autonomous vehicles for these tasks has received a growing interest in the last ten years, and few pioneering projects have been funded on this topic. Among these projects, the Italian MARIS project had the goal of developing technologies and methodologies for the use of autonomous Underwater Vehicle Manipulator Systems in underwater manipulation and transportation tasks. This work presents the developed control framework, the mechatronic integration, and the project's final experimental results on floating underwater intervention.Index Terms underwater vehicle manipulator system; underwater gripper; underwater vision; floating underwater control; task priority control; underwater intervention.

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The Italian national project MARIS (Marine Robotics for Interventions) pursues the strategic objective of studying, developing, and integrating technologies and methodologies to enable the development of autonomous underwater robotic systems employable for intervention activities. These activities are becoming progressively more typical for the underwater offshore industry, for search-and-rescue operations, and for underwater scientific missions. Within such an ambitious objective, the project consortium also intends to demonstrate the achievable operational capabilities at a proof-of-concept level by integrating the results with prototype experimental systems.

The Arctic region is known to be severely affected by climate change, with evident alterations in both physical and biological processes. Monitoring the Arctic Ocean ecosystem is key to understanding the impact of natural and human-induced change on the environment. Large data sets are required to monitor the Arctic marine ecosystem and validate high-resolution satellite observations (e.g., Sentinel), which are necessary to feed climatic and biogeochemical forecasting models. However, the Global Observing System needs to complete its geographic coverage, particularly for the harsh, extreme environment of the Arctic Region. In this scenario, autonomous systems are proving to be valuable tools for increasing the resolution of existing data. To this end, a low-cost, miniaturized and flexible probe, ArLoC (Arctic Low-Cost probe), was designed, built and installed on an innovative unmanned marine vehicle, the PROTEUS (Portable RObotic TEchnology for Unmanned Surveys), during a preliminary scientific campaign in the Svalbard Archipelago within the UVASS project. This study outlines the instrumentation used and its design features, its preliminary integration on PROTEUS and its test results.