DREAM: Domain-aware Reasoning for Efficient Autonomous Underwater Monitoring

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Wu, Zhenqi, Modi, Abhinav, Mavrogiannis, Angelos, Joshi, Kaustubh, Chopra, Nikhil, Aloimonos, Yiannis, Karapetyan, Nare, Rekleitis, Ioannis, Lin, Xiaomin
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Wu, Zhenqi
Modi, Abhinav
Mavrogiannis, Angelos
Joshi, Kaustubh
Chopra, Nikhil
Aloimonos, Yiannis
Karapetyan, Nare
Rekleitis, Ioannis
Lin, Xiaomin
author_facet Wu, Zhenqi
Modi, Abhinav
Mavrogiannis, Angelos
Joshi, Kaustubh
Chopra, Nikhil
Aloimonos, Yiannis
Karapetyan, Nare
Rekleitis, Ioannis
Lin, Xiaomin
contents The ocean is warming and acidifying, increasing the risk of mass mortality events for temperature-sensitive shellfish such as oysters. This motivates the development of long-term monitoring systems. However, human labor is costly and long-duration underwater work is highly hazardous, thus favoring robotic solutions as a safer and more efficient option. To enable underwater robots to make real-time, environment-aware decisions without human intervention, we must equip them with an intelligent "brain." This highlights the need for persistent,wide-area, and low-cost benthic monitoring. To this end, we present DREAM, a Vision Language Model (VLM)-guided autonomy framework for long-term underwater exploration and habitat monitoring. The results show that our framework is highly efficient in finding and exploring target objects (e.g., oysters, shipwrecks) without prior location information. In the oyster-monitoring task, our framework takes 31.5% less time than the previous baseline with the same amount of oysters. Compared to the vanilla VLM, it uses 23% fewer steps while covering 8.88% more oysters. In shipwreck scenes, our framework successfully explores and maps the wreck without collisions, requiring 27.5% fewer steps than the vanilla model and achieving 100% coverage, while the vanilla model achieves 60.23% average coverage in our shipwreck environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_13666
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DREAM: Domain-aware Reasoning for Efficient Autonomous Underwater Monitoring
Wu, Zhenqi
Modi, Abhinav
Mavrogiannis, Angelos
Joshi, Kaustubh
Chopra, Nikhil
Aloimonos, Yiannis
Karapetyan, Nare
Rekleitis, Ioannis
Lin, Xiaomin
Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
The ocean is warming and acidifying, increasing the risk of mass mortality events for temperature-sensitive shellfish such as oysters. This motivates the development of long-term monitoring systems. However, human labor is costly and long-duration underwater work is highly hazardous, thus favoring robotic solutions as a safer and more efficient option. To enable underwater robots to make real-time, environment-aware decisions without human intervention, we must equip them with an intelligent "brain." This highlights the need for persistent,wide-area, and low-cost benthic monitoring. To this end, we present DREAM, a Vision Language Model (VLM)-guided autonomy framework for long-term underwater exploration and habitat monitoring. The results show that our framework is highly efficient in finding and exploring target objects (e.g., oysters, shipwrecks) without prior location information. In the oyster-monitoring task, our framework takes 31.5% less time than the previous baseline with the same amount of oysters. Compared to the vanilla VLM, it uses 23% fewer steps while covering 8.88% more oysters. In shipwreck scenes, our framework successfully explores and maps the wreck without collisions, requiring 27.5% fewer steps than the vanilla model and achieving 100% coverage, while the vanilla model achieves 60.23% average coverage in our shipwreck environments.
title DREAM: Domain-aware Reasoning for Efficient Autonomous Underwater Monitoring
topic Robotics
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13666