VORTEX: versatile and open subsea robot for technical experiment

This paper describes the new experimental vehicle, named VORTEX (versatile and open subsea robot for technical experiment), built by the Subsea Robotics Laboratory at the French Institute for Sea Exploitation (Ifremer). It is especially developed to become a testbed platform for robotics applications. The vehicle conception went through several phases including hardware architecture design, software design and human-machine interface design. In this paper, these three features are described through the vehicle presentation and the presentation of its sensing and actuation equipment. We present briefly the vehicle control system, more precisely the high level mission programming architecture. Typical tasks the vehicle will have to perform in an autonomous way are also stated