  In this report, we present the system design, operational strategy, and
results of coordinated multi-vehicle field demonstrations of autonomous marine
robotic technologies in search-for-life missions within the Pacific shelf
margin of Costa Rica and the Santorini-Kolumbo caldera complex, which serve as
analogs to environments that may exist in oceans beyond Earth. This report
focuses on the automation of ROV manipulator operations for targeted biological
sample-collection-and-return from the seafloor. In the context of future
extraterrestrial exploration missions to ocean worlds, an ROV is an analog to a
planetary lander, which must be capable of high-level autonomy. Our field
trials involve two underwater vehicles, the SuBastian ROV and the Nereid Under
Ice (NUI) hybrid ROV for mixed initiative (i.e., teleoperated or autonomous)
missions, both equipped 7-DoF hydraulic manipulators. We describe an adaptable,
hardware-independent computer vision architecture that enables high-level
automated manipulation. The vision system provides a 3D understanding of the
workspace to inform manipulator motion planning in complex unstructured
environments. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the vision system and control
framework through field trials in increasingly challenging environments,
including the automated collection and return of biological samples from within
the active undersea volcano, Kolumbo. Based on our experiences in the field, we
discuss the performance of our system and identify promising directions for
future research.
