Abstract
Offshore wind farms are becoming the main alternative to fossil fuels and the future key to mitigating climate change by achieving energy sustainability. With favorable indicators in almost every environmental index, these structures operate under varying and dynamic environmental conditions, leading to efficiency losses and sudden failures. For these reasons, it's fundamental to promote the development of autonomous solutions to monitor the health condition of the construction parts, preventing structural damage and accidents. This paper introduces a new simulation environment for testing and training autonomous inspection techniques under a more realistic offshore wind farm scenario. Combining the Gazebo simulator with ROS, this framework can include multi-robots with different sensors to operate in a customizable simulation environment regarding some external elements (fog, wind, buoyancy...). The paper also presents a use case composed of a 3D LiDAR-based technique for autonomous wind turbine inspection with UAV, including point cloud clustering, model estimation, and the preliminary results under this simulation framework using a mixed environment (offshore simulation with a real UAV platform).

Abstract
The use of autonomous vehicles in maritime operations is a technological challenge. In the particular case of autonomous aerial vehicles (UAVs), their application ranges from inspection and surveillance of offshore power plants, and marine life observation, to search and rescue missions. Manually landing UAVs onboard water vessels can be very challenging due to limited space onboard and wave agitation. This paper proposes an autonomous solution for the task of landing commercial multicopter UAVs with onboard cameras on water vessels, based on the detection of a custom landing platform with computer vision techniques. The autonomous landing behavior was tested in real conditions, using a research vessel at sea, where the UAV was able to detect, locate, and safely land on top of the developed landing platform.

Abstract

Abstract
This paper describes the mission control software used in the LSTS/FEUP underwater vehicles. This software follows the guidelines of the generalized vehicle architecture [1], adapts the original idea to encompass the current application requirements and constitutes a first implementation. The work is focused on the design and implementation of an application that can be easily adapted to different vehicle configurations or even to different vehicles. One of the desired goals was to enhance software reusability and to establish a development environment that allows developers with a minimal knowledge of coding details to upgrade the application. To assist this purpose, a CASE tool, which provides modern software development techniques, was used. A simulation environment was also developed whose purpose is to test the applications and to detect possible malfunctions before they occur during mission execution.

Abstract
An automated maneuver control framework for a Remotely Operate Vehicle (ROV) is presented. This framework entails a three-layered control architecture, a principled approach to design and implementation within the architecture, and hybrid systems design techniques. The control architecture is structured according to the principle of composition of vehicle motions from a minimal set of elemental maneuvers that are designed and verified independently. The principled approach is based on distributed hybrid systems techniques, and spans integrated design, simulation and implementation as the same model is used throughout. Hybrid systems control techniques are used to synthesize the elemental maneuvers and to design protocols, which coordinate the execution of elemental maneuvers within a complex maneuver. The architecture is fault-tolerant by design since it uses verified maneuvers. This work is part of the Inspection of Underwater Structures (IES) project whose main objective is the implementation of a ROV-based system for the Inspection of underwater structures.

Abstract
This paper reports the design of a new remotely operated underwater vehicle (ROV), which has been developed at the Underwater Systems and Technology Laboratory (USTL) - University of Porto. This design is contextualized on the KOS project (Kits for underwater operations). The main issues addressed here concern directional drag minimization, symmetry, optimized thruster positioning, stability and layout of ROV components. This design is aimed at optimizing ROV performance for a set of different operational scenarios. This is achieved through modular configurations which are optimized for each different scenario.