CADDY Project, Year 2: The First Validation Trials

"CADDY - Cognitive Autonomous Diving Buddy" is an FP7 project that that is devoted to developing a cognitive underwater robotic system that will help divers during their activities in this hazardous environment. The envisioned resulting system will play a threefold role similar to those that a human buddy diver should have: buddy "observer", buddy "slave", and buddy "guide". During the second year of the project, validation trials were organized in Croatia with the purpose of testing all developed algorithms that will enable the three roles of the CADDY system. The trials were structured in five experiments. This paper is devoted to providing a concise overview of the conducted experiments and major results.