OceanOneK: A Deep-Sea Robotic Avatar

Distancing humans physically from dangerous and unreachable spaces while connecting their skills, intuition, and experience to the task promises to fundamentally alter the future of work and remote robotic operations in extreme environments. This has been thoroughly illustrated during the recent expeditions of OceanOne^K, where its advanced autonomous skills for physical interaction in deep-sea have been effectively combined with the cognitive abilities of a human expert through an intuitive haptic/stereo-vision interface. During several archaeological expeditions in the Mediterranean, OceanOne^K demonstrated remarkable performance in operating at deep depths. These developments show how human-robot collaboration-induced synergy can expand our abilities to reach new resources, deliver medical care to distant patients, build and maintain remote infrastructure, and perform disaster prevention and recovery operations – be it deep in oceans and mines, at mountain tops, or in space.