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About

Eduard Vidal is a robotics researcher specializing in autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), with a particular focus on motion planning, autonomous exploration, and underwater inspection systems. His work addresses some of the most technically demanding challenges in marine robotics: enabling robots to navigate, map, and inspect complex underwater environments with minimal human intervention. Vidal's most influential contribution is his work on the Sparus II AUV platform, a hovering vehicle designed for seabed inspection that has accumulated 194 citations since 2018, reflecting its broad adoption as a research benchmark. He has made significant advances in online path planning and next-best-view algorithms that allow AUVs to dynamically adapt their trajectories in real time — critical for safely operating in unstructured environments like underwater caves, a domain he helped pioneer with a widely used sonar dataset (60 citations). His research further extends to 3D exploration methodologies, multilayered motion planning incorporating hydrodynamic constraints, and frontier-based viewpoint generation for unknown environments. Beyond academic contributions, Vidal has engaged with real-world applications through the ATLANTIS project, targeting inspection and maintenance of offshore wind farms. Collectively, his body of work has shaped how autonomous underwater systems perceive, plan, and act in challenging subsea environments.