Simulations are highly valuable in marine robotics, offering a cost-effective and controlled environment for testing in the challenging conditions of underwater and surface operations. Given the high costs and logistical difficulties of real-world trials, simulators capable of capturing the operational conditions of subsea environments have become key in developing and refining algorithms for remotely-operated and autonomous underwater vehicles. This paper highlights recent enhancements to the Stonefish simulator, an advanced open-source platform supporting development and testing of marine robotics solutions. Key updates include a suite of additional sensors, such as an event-based camera, a thermal camera, and an optical flow camera, as well as, visual light communication, support for tethered operations, improved thruster modelling, more flexible hydrodynamics, and enhanced sonar accuracy. These developments and an automated annotation tool significantly bolster Stonefish's role in marine robotics research, especially in the field of machine learning, where training data with a known ground truth is hard or impossible to collect. https://github.com/patrykcieslak/stonefish

This paper presents a control architecture for an underwater vehicle-manipulator system (UVMS) to enable simultaneous tracking of end-effector configuration and contact force during floating-base manipulation. The main feature of the architecture is its combination of a task-priority (TP) kinematic control algorithm with a custom force control strategy, based on impedance (admittance) control. The TP algorithm used in the work includes recent treatment of equality and inequality tasks as well as original concepts to handle operation in singular configurations of the system. In the force control part the impedance concept is extended to allow for direct control over the value of exerted force and torque. Additional feed-forward signal is used to ensure stable contact. The performance of the control architecture is demonstrated by experiments in a test tank, with GIRONA500 I-AUV performing pipe inspection.

This paper proposes a controller for the GIRONA500 Underwater Vehicle Manipulator System and reports experimental results for an autonomous floating-base valve-turning manipulation application. The selected method is based on kinematic control, avoiding the need for a complex, and difficult to obtain, hydrodynamic model. The method relies on the decoupled control of the vehicle and manipulator velocities using a combination of the task priority redundancy resolution and the task concurrence approaches. The paper discusses the manipulation tasks needed, their hierarchical organisation, and a set of strategies that were needed to complement the `standard' task-priority approach to successfully solve the floating-base manipulation problem in water tank experimental conditions.