Underwater operations present unique challenges and opportunities for
robotic applications. These can be attributed in part to limited
sensing capabilities, and to locomotion behaviours requiring control
schemes adapted to specific tasks or changes in the environment. From
enhancing teleoperation procedures, to 
providing high-level instruction, all the way to fully autonomous
operations, enabling autonomous capabilities is fundamental for the
successful deployment of underwater robots. This paper presents an
overview of the approaches used during  underwater sea trials in
the coral reefs of Barbados, for two amphibious mobile robots and a
set of underwater sensor nodes. We present control mechanisms used for
maintaining a preset trajectory during enhanced teleoperations and
discuss their experimental results. This is followed by
a discussion on amphibious data gathering experiments conducted
on the beach. We then present a tetherless underwater communication
approach based on pure vision 
for  high-level control of an underwater vehicle. Finally the
construction details together with preliminary results from a set of
distributed underwater sensor nodes are outlined.