https://embodied-ai-radar.com/robots/underwater.xml 2026-11-10T00:00:00ZEmbodied AI Radar https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.11940 2026-11-10T00:00:00Z

Underwater leader-follower formation control requires continuous relative-pose estimation despite degraded sensing conditions and limited onboard computation. This paper presents a reliability-adaptive multimodal perception framework for six-degree-of-freedom relative-pose tracking between two moving underwater robots. The framework integrates complementary visual, acoustic-ranging, and hydrodynamic measurements while accounting for their distinct physical characteristics and time-varying reliability. It adaptively weights modality contributions and models temporal dependencies with linear …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.08898 2026-11-09T00:00:00Z

Reliable relative tracking is fundamental to cooperative autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), yet remains challenging under nonlinear vehicle dynamics and degraded underwater visual conditions. Active light markers improve robustness to appearance variation, but provide deliberately sparse observations that can become incomplete or corrupted by occlusion, reflections, and detection noise during dynamic motion. To address the resulting partial-observation control problem, this paper proposes FATHOM, a world-model-guided diffusion action-trajectory selection framework for sparse-marker AUV …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06689 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

Teleoperating a Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV) in complex underwater environments presents unique challenges. Dynamic, three dimensional obstacles and unseen water currents pose real risks to expensive robotic hardware in environments in which recovery can be next to impossible. This paper explores the cognitive effects of haptic feedback to improve vehicle safety in such environments. An in-water study is analysed with a ROV exposed to controlled cross-currents, with environmental information presented via a soft and vibrating haptic touchpad. Results demonstrate that while encountering an …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.06162 2026-11-05T00:00:00Z

This extended abstract discusses a specific and, in our experience, practically relevant role for large language models (LLMs) in underwater robotics. Our main premise is that, in underwater fielding missions, the immediate difficulty is often not the synthesis of new low-level control laws, but the operation of complex robotic systems under limited communications, partial observability, and expensive field time. In particular, a significant fraction of the effort during sea trials is devoted to fault diagnosis, telemetry interpretation, mission adjustment, and coordination across …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.04518 2026-11-04T00:00:00Z

Coordinating autonomous underwater vehicles requires translating operator intent into feasible assignments while preserving autonomous execution when communication is limited. We present a hierarchical framework that couples Large Language Model (LLM) interpretation of natural-language mission instructions with Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) and distributed Behaviour Tree (BT) execution. The LLM extracts assignment and ordering constraints, which the MILP optimizer combines with vehicle capabilities and temporal requirements. A BT-LLM Bridge distributes the resulting allocations to …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2611.00367 2026-11-03T00:00:00Z

Defense systems for maritime assets must distinguish approaching benign craft from uncrewed surface vessels (USVs) with sufficient warning to act. Shore cameras using computer vision can separate hostile vessels from benign traffic, but these systems may be attacked using an adversarial hull patch or physical disguise. We evaluate adversarial hull patches and find they suppress detection in up to 29% of attempts but never cause misclassification as benign. Physical disguise, however, can bypass both a camera check and a radar presence check. To evaluate defenses, we develop a hybrid replay …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41676 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Autonomous surface vessels operating in urban waterways must coordinate with other vessels in confined spaces while complying with traffic regulations, often without knowing their intentions. We present a decentralized motion planner based on model predictive path integral control, a sampling-based model predictive control scheme. The planner jointly computes a trajectory for the ego vessel and a prediction of the trajectories of the other vessels, and therefore accounts for their interaction. Traffic regulations are encoded as discontinuous costs, which the sampling-based formulation admits …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.40900 2026-11-02T00:00:00Z

Reliable visual perception is essential for safe autonomous underwater exploration. Yet vision models pretrained on terrestrial images become less reliable underwater, where turbidity, backscatter, and wavelength-dependent attenuation alter scene appearance. Existing adaptation methods either spread adapters equally across the encoder depth or select layers using the divergence between two fixed domains. In this paper, we introduce AquaProbe for measuring how the location of the domain gap changes with water type and imaging range. AquaProbe separates newly introduced divergence from that …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.38199 2026-10-30T00:00:00Z

Behavior Cloning has demonstrated promising generalization capabilities for robotic manipulation in terrestrial environments. However, marine visual distortions and dynamic currents create a severe domain shift that remains a key bottleneck in adapting generalist architectures to underwater field manipulation. To address this, 1616 episodes of underwater manipulation data were collected in calm and turbulent waters and were used to train 14 generalist Vision-Language-Action (VLA) models (DynamicVLA) with varying proprioception observation configurations. Across three tasks on 1260 gradable …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.36454 2026-10-28T00:00:00Z

As expansion and scalability in underwater oper- ations becomes more important and challenging, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) become more relevant and the necessity for reliable autonomy more critical. A fundamental challenge in any autonomous underwater operation, from control to safe navigation and mapping, is state estimation; a notorious hard problem to address, especially in low visibility conditions. In this paper, we tackle this problem, by presenting SVIn+, a multi-sensor framework for robust state estimation of AUVs equipped with an IMU, cameras, a water-pressure sensor, a …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.26106 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

We present a complete, GPU-resident pipeline for multi-robot 3D inspection of underwater structures. Given a triangle mesh and a fleet of $K$ robots, each carrying a short-range, limited field-of-view camera, the pipeline computes 6-DOF trajectories that jointly cover a target fraction of the surface while minimizing a linearly interpolated makespan/total-cost objective. The joint problem is NP-hard, so we decompose it into five core stages - candidate viewpoint generation, visibility computation, set cover, min-max vehicle routing solved as a mixed integer program (MIP) with lifted …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.25534 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Underwater robots support a growing range of work, from inspecting offshore structures and pipelines to surveying reefs and accompanying divers. Most of these tasks, however, are still flown by hand by a pilot, which raises the question of whether they can be carried out autonomously instead. On land, vision-language-action (VLA) models already let robots carry out tasks autonomously from language instructions, which makes them a natural candidate for taking the pilot's place. Underwater, however, there is little data to train such models. We take inspiration from how these tasks are flown …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.23873 2026-10-20T00:00:00Z

Reliable obstacle perception is challenging for small autonomous surface vessels (ASVs): reflections and glare confound visible-light cameras, vessel motion shifts the apparent waterline, and darkness removes the dominant sensing modality altogether. Rather than treating multimodal fusion as a static accuracy gain, we propose a context-aware architecture that combines RGB and long-wave infrared (LWIR) imagery, frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) mmWave radar, and inertial context. A bearing-sector interface provides the navigation controller with calibrated obstacle probabilities, …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20957 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

Accurate trajectory tracking is essential for autonomous underwater vehicles operating with uncertain hydrodynamics and limited thruster authority. This paper develops a low-complexity adaptive prescribed performance controller for uncertain underwater vehicle dynamics with coupled and saturated inputs. The proposed method adapts the performance functions directly through the mismatch between the requested and saturated control inputs, enlarging the performance funnels only when the available actuation cannot meet the nominal specifications. A coupled invariant-set analysis establishes …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20871 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

This paper presents a comprehensive methodology, backed by simulation and experimental results, for an adaptive mission planning strategy that is mathematically grounded in the maximization of the information-driven quantity of clarity. In particular, the methodology introduced in this work addresses the use of sustainably powered autonomous surface vessels (ASVs) to perform scientific missions that prioritize locations of maximum interest. Because these locations of maximum interest are not known a priori but are rather identified based on in-situ measurements, online adaptation is essential …

https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19993 2026-10-14T00:00:00Z

Reconstruction of 3D structures using under-ice AUV video footage has been inaccurate, although it is not certain whether this is due to shortcomings in the methods or an inherent deficiency of the capture system. We test four different models for reconstruction on the same Antarctic under-ice AUV video (Icefin, Kamb Ice Stream): classical feature matching SfM, differentiable photometric splatting, volumetric depth fusion, and a pose-free feed-forward foundation model. All four fail, each in a distinct way: near-total registration yielding almost no structure, geometrically broken output …