Overview of the FP7 project “CADDY — Cognitive Autonomous Diving Buddy”

This paper summarizes the main accomplishments of the first year of the FP7 project “CADDY - Cognitive Autonomous Diving Buddy”. The main objective of the project is to replace a human buddy diver with an autonomous underwater vehicle and add an autonomous surface vehicle to improve monitoring, assistance, and safety of the diver´s mission. While all envisioned objectives of the project are listed, the paper focuses on the results that were obtained in the following areas of research: development of the multicomponent robotic system, “Seeing the Diver” (underwater perception), “Understanding the Diver” (cognition in the form of interpreting diver sign language, behaviour and physiological parameters), and diver-robot cooperation and control.