Recent developments in marine technologies allow underwater vehicles to perform survey
missions for data collection in an automatic way. The scientific community is now focusing
on endowing these vehicles with strong perception capabilities, aiming at full autonomy and
decision-making skills. Such abilities would bring benefits to a wide range of field
applications, eg Inspection and Maintenance (I&M) of man-made structures, port security,
and marine rescue. Indeed, most of these tasks are currently carried out employing remotely …