AI-Driven Marine Robotics: Emerging Trends in Underwater Perception and Ecosystem Monitoring

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2509.01878v1
• Date: Tue, 02 Sep 2025 01:51:31 GMT
• Title: AI-Driven Marine Robotics: Emerging Trends in Underwater Perception and Ecosystem Monitoring
• Authors: Scarlett Raine, Tobias Fischer,
• Abstract summary: Marine ecosystems face increasing pressure due to climate change, driving the need for scalable, AI-powered monitoring solutions.<n>This paper examines the rapid emergence of underwater AI as a major research frontier and analyzes the factors that have transformed marine perception into a catalyst for AI innovation.
• Score: 5.107513287801565
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Marine ecosystems face increasing pressure due to climate change, driving the need for scalable, AI-powered monitoring solutions. This paper examines the rapid emergence of underwater AI as a major research frontier and analyzes the factors that have transformed marine perception from a niche application into a catalyst for AI innovation. We identify three convergent drivers: environmental necessity for ecosystem-scale monitoring, democratization of underwater datasets through citizen science platforms, and researcher migration from saturated terrestrial computer vision domains. Our analysis reveals how unique underwater challenges - turbidity, cryptic species detection, expert annotation bottlenecks, and cross-ecosystem generalization - are driving fundamental advances in weakly supervised learning, open-set recognition, and robust perception under degraded conditions. We survey emerging trends in datasets, scene understanding and 3D reconstruction, highlighting the paradigm shift from passive observation toward AI-driven, targeted intervention capabilities. The paper demonstrates how underwater constraints are pushing the boundaries of foundation models, self-supervised learning, and perception, with methodological innovations that extend far beyond marine applications to benefit general computer vision, robotics, and environmental monitoring.

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