Angler: An Autonomy Framework for Intervention Tasks with Lightweight Underwater Vehicle Manipulator Systems

Developing autonomous intervention capabili- ties for lightweight underwater vehicle manipulator systems (UVMS) has garnered significant attention within recent years because of the opportunity for these systems to reduce interven- tion operating costs. Developing autonomous UVMS capabilities is challenging, however, because of the lack of available stan- dardized software frameworks and pipelines. Previous works offer simulation environments and deployment pipelines for underwater vehicles, but fall short of providing a complete UVMS software framework. We address this gap by creating Angler: a software framework for developing localization, control, and decision-making algorithms with support for sim- to-real transfer. We validate this framework by implementing a state-of-the-art control architecture and demonstrate the ability to perform station keeping with a mean error below 0.25 m and waypoint tracking with an average final error of 0.398 m.