Design of Autonomous Robots for sea-based Aquaculture using the SEATONOMY Method

The ARTIFEX project aims at developing robots for remote and/or autonomous inspection, maintenance and repair (IMR) operations at fish farms. An unmanned surface vehicle (USV) is used as a platform for carrying a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) for underwater operations and a remotely piloted aircraft systems (RPAS) for airborne inspections. The robotic platform shall execute inspection operations (e.g. nets and mooring lines), and light intervention tasks (e.g. net repair, cleaning of mooring lines, dead fish removal). The level of autonomy, i.e. the ability of a robot to make decisions and carry out tasks on its own, is a crucial design specification for a complex robotic system. Interaction and coordination between the parent and peripheral vehicles as well as operational planning in an unstructured environment and the handling of unforeseen events, like loss of communication, are also significant challenges that complex robotic systems such as ARTIFEX must overcome. The SEATONOMY methodology provides the tools required to tackle such problems. It was established by SINTEF for design and development of maritime mobile autonomous systems and operations, and it provides a set of methods, guidelines, principles and best practices for designing robotic systems. One of these is Autonomous Job Analysis (AJA) which is a structured way of breaking down an operation into sub-operations and helps the design team reveal challenges, needs and limitations regarding autonomous behaviour. This presentation will show how the AJA method has been applied when designing the ARTIFEX robotic platform. After the main goal of each operation had been defined, the operation was broken down into sub-goals and sub-operations to reduce the complexity of the analysis, and questions related to the AJA categories were answered for each sub-operation. These categories include key aspects for autonomous systems such as human machine interaction, success criteria, safe states, perception, communication, failure modes and safety barriers. Through an iterative workflow, where complexity was added incrementally, the required tasks for each unit to achieve the overall inspection / intervention goals were identified. Solutions for coordination between the different vehicles were obtained as well, together with the technical specifications of the necessary equipment for sensing and communication.