Towards a Robust System Helping Underwater Archaeologists Through the Acquisition of Geo-referenced Optical and Acoustic Data (original) (raw)
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OCEANS 2015 - Genova, 2015
In the framework of the ARROWS project (FP7 Environment 308724, September 2012 -August 2015, venture funded by the European Commission, modular Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) have been developed to the main purposes of mapping, diagnosing, cleaning, and securing of underwater and coastal archaeological sites. These AUVs consist of modular mobile robots, designed and manufactured according to specific directions formulated by a group of expert archaeologists, the Archaeological Advisory Group (AAG). A preliminary fleet of mobile robots, with supplied functionalities that can be adjusted on the mission purpose, has been put together. The vehicles are typically equipped with acoustic modems to communicate during the dive and with different payload devices to sense the environment: a pair of synchronized digital cameras operating in the visible light range, a structured light source (blue laser) plus led illuminators and, depending on the mission requirement, a multibeam forward looking echo-sounder or a side looking sonar. These sensors represent appealing choices to the oceanographic engineer since they provide complementary information about the surrounding environment. Generally speaking acoustic sensors are exploited to create large scale maps of the environment while cameras provide more detailed images of the targets. The main goal of the ARROWS missions is to perform a systematic mapping of the marine seafloors and to process the output maps to detect and classify potential archaeological targets.
The ARROWS project: adapting and developing robotics technologies for underwater archaeology
IFAC-PapersOnLine, 2015
ARchaeological RObot systems for the World's Seas (ARROWS) EU Project proposes to adapt and develop low-cost Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) technologies to significantly reduce the cost of archaeological operations, covering the full extent of archaeological campaign. ARROWS methodology is to identify the archaeologists requirements in all phases of the campaign and to propose related technological solutions. Starting from the necessities identified by archaeological project partners in collaboration with the Archaeology Advisory Group, a board composed of European archaeologists from outside ARROWS, the aim is the development of a heterogeneous team of cooperating AUVs capable of comply with a complete archaeological autonomous mission. Three new different AUVs have been designed in the framework of the project according to the archaeologists' indications: MARTA, characterized by a strong hardware modularity for ease of payload and propulsion systems configuration change; U-CAT, a turtle inspired bio-mimetic robot devoted to shipwreck penetration and A Size AUV, a vehicle of small dimensions and weight easily deployable even by a single person. These three vehicles will cooperate within the project with AUVs already owned by ARROWS partners exploiting a distributed high-level control software based on the World Model Service (WMS), a storage system for the environment knowledge, updated in real-time through online payload data process, in the form of an ontology. The project includes also the development of a cleaning tool for well-known artifacts maintenance operations. The paper presents the current stage of the project that will lead to overall system final demonstrations, during Summer 2015, in two different scenarios, Sicily (Italy) and Baltic Sea (Estonia).
Design of a modular Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for archaeological investigations
OCEANS 2015 - Genova, 2015
FP7 European project. The ARROWS project challenge is to provide the underwater archaeologists with technological tools for cost affordable campaigns: i.e. ARROWS adapts and develops low cost AUV technologies to significantly reduce the cost of archaeological operations, covering the full extent of an archaeological campaign (underwater mapping, diagnosis and cleaning tasks). The tools and methodologies developed within ARROWS comply with the "Annex" of the 2001 UNESCO Convention for the protection of Underwater Cultural Heritage (UCH). The system effectiveness and MARTA performance will be demonstrated in two scenarios, different as regards the environment and the historical context, the Mediterranean Sea (Egadi Islands) and the Baltic Sea.
2012
The Thesaurus Project, funded by the Regione Toscana, combines humanistic and technological research aiming at developing a new generation of cooperating Autonomous Underwater Vehicles and at documenting ancient and modern Tuscany shipwrecks. Technological research will allow performing an archaeological exploration mission through the use of a swarm of autonomous, smart and self-organizing underwater vehicles. Using acoustic communications, these vehicles will be able to exchange each other data related to the state of the exploration and then to adapt their behavior to improve the survey. The archival research and archaeological survey aim at collecting all reports related to the underwater evidences and the events of sinking occurred in the sea of Tuscany. The collected data will be organized in a specific database suitably modeled.
Underwater archeology missions design for data gathering automation
In this paper, we propose a methodology for marine archeological survey, which aims at enhancing productivity and safety during on-field missions. A primary interest of the archaeological investigation is to extract, in a non invasive way, as much information as possible from a site with minimal expenditure of time and of expensive resources. In general, this is done by taking photos and measurements of objects and terrain, which are then used to construct representations of the site in form of maps. In the proposed approach, standard manual procedures for structuring the site and for gathering data of the above mentioned type have been redesigned in order to exploit beneficially the potential of cooperation between human operators and robotics devices, such as ROVs. In this way, augmented, informative maps of underwater archaeological sites can be constructed by associating, integrating and fusing data gathered by heterogeneous sensors. The analysis of data gathered employing the p...
Teams of Robots for Underwater Archaeology: the ARROWS Project
ARROWS is the acronym for Archaeological RObot systems for the World’s Seas. The project, started in September 2012, is funded by the EU in the framework of the FP7 call ENV-2012, challenge 6.2-6, devoted to “Development of advanced technologies and tools for mapping, diagnosing, excavating, and securing underwater and coastal archaeological sites”. The ARROWS consortium comprises expertise from underwater archaeology, underwater engineering, robotics, image processing and recognition from academia and industry. 10 partners from 5 different Countries are involved.
A new method for underwater archaeological surveying using sensors and unmanned platforms
As most of the world's oceans are inaccessible to diving archaeologists, we must rely on advanced underwater technology and marine robotics to explore, map and investigate ship wrecks in these areas. New sensors and unmanned sensor platforms represent huge potentials for archaeological applications, but require a scrutinous look at how established archaeological methods and approaches must be adapted or rejected to optimize the results. Surveys done on a disintegrated wreck site with acoustic sensors like side scan sonar and synthetic aperture sonar, and optical sensors like stereo cameras, video and underwater hyperspectral imager, are compiled to serve as a case study to demonstrate the method. Challenges regarding guidance, navigation and control are discussed.
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Underwater cultural heritage sites are subject to constant change, whether due to natural forces such as sediments, waves, currents or human intervention. Until a few decades ago, the documentation and research of these sites was mostly done manually by diving archaeologists. This paper presents the results of the integration of remote sensing technologies with autonomous marine vehicles in order to make the task of site documentation even faster, more accurate, more efficient and more precisely georeferenced. It includes the integration of multibeam sonar, side scan sonar and various cameras into autonomous surface and underwater vehicles, remotely operated vehicle and unmanned aerial vehicle. In total, case studies for nine underwater cultural heritage sites around the Mediterranean region are presented. Each case study contains a brief archaeological background of the site, the methodology of using autonomous marine vehicles and sensors for their documentation, and the results in...
ISPRS - International Archives of the Photogrammetry, Remote Sensing and Spatial Information Sciences
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), benefiting from significant investments in the past years, are commonly used for military security and offshore Oil&Gas applications. The ARROWS project 1 , aimed at exporting the AUV technology to the field of underwater archaeology, a low-budget research field compared to the previous ones. The paper focuses on the strategy for vehicle coordination adopted within the project, a Search and Inspection (S&I) approach borrowed from the defense field (e.g., mine countermeasure-MCM) that proved to be an efficient solution also for the main phases of an underwater archaeological mission. The other main novelty aspect is represented by MARTA (MArine Robotic Tool for Archaeology) AUV: it is a modular vehicle easily and quickly reconfigurable developed in the framework of ARROWS according to the project Archaeological Advisory Group (AAG) guidelines. Results from the final demonstration of the project, held in Estonia during Summer 2015, are proposed in the paper as an experimental proof of the validity of the proposed S&I strategy, and MARTA functioning and its adaptability to the mission requirements. Even in its first prototype version, MARTA successfully played the Inspection role within the AUV team, collaborating with a commercial Search AUV. Acoustic and optical data collected during the mission and processed to increase their intelligibility for the human operator are proposed and discussed.