The ARROWS project: adapting and developing robotics technologies for underwater archaeology (original) (raw)
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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.
2010
The goals of this article are twofold. First, we detail the operations and discuss the results of the 2005 Chios an-cient shipwreck survey. This survey was conducted by an international team of engineers, archaeologists, and natural scientists off the Greek island of Chios in the northeastern Aegean Sea using an autonomous under-water vehicle (AUV) built specifically for high-resolution site inspection and characterization. Second, using the survey operations as context, we identify the specific challenges of adapting AUV technology for deep water archaeology and describe how our team addressed these challenges during the Chios expedition. After identifying the state of the art in robotic tools for deep water archaeology, we discuss opportunities in which new developments and research (e.g., AUV platforms, underwater imaging, remote sensing, and navigation techniques) will improve the rapid assessment of deep water archaeological sites. It is our hope that by report-
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.
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.
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.
2.4. An ASV (Autonomous Surface Vehicle) for Archaeology- The Pla.pdf
This chapter seeks to inform the archaeological community about a robotic autonomous surface vehicle (ASV) currently being developed for shallow-water applications in marine sciences and archaeology (Miškovic´ et al. 2011, Miškovic´ et al. 2013; Vasilijevic´ et al. 2015). The ASV Pladypos (a PLAtform for DYnamic POSitioning) was developed at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Electrical Engineering and Computing, in the Laboratory for Underwater Systems and Technologies (LABUST). Its main characteristic, from which it obtained its name, is dynamic positioning at sea. The Pladypos uses GPS to keep a steady position at a requested location or along transects while actively compensating for external disturbances such as wind, waves, and currents. The Pladypos can deploy with a variety of cameras and sensors to survey submerged ancient harbors and coastal settlements, or any underwater landscape where current digital recording strategies do not scale well beyond the size of individual shipwreck sites. The Pladypos was originally developed to answer research needs identified by underwater archaeologists and other marine scientists, and collaboration between the engineers and archaeologists on real field missions was planned from the outset as a means to increase interdisciplinary understanding and identify areas for improvement. Here we present some preliminary results and describe the experience of an interdisciplinary team using the Pladypos to create a georeferenced bathymetric map and integrated photomosaic of the submerged ruins at Caesarea Maritima in Israel
A ROV for supporting the planned maintenance in underwater archaeological sites
— Remotely Operated underwater Vehicles (ROVs) play an important role in a number of operations conducted in shallow and deep water (e.g.: exploration, survey, intervention, etc.), in several application fields like marine science, offshore construction, and underwater archeology. In this work we describe the preliminary steps in the development of the setup of a special ROV addressed to perform the monitoring and the planned maintenance activities required to prevent the biological colonization in an underwater archeological site. In order to perform these operations, the ROV has been equipped with a custom arm and an opto-acoustic camera. To simultaneously satisfy position and force trajectory constraints, the vehicle-manipulator system is also controlled through a hybrid position-force control scheme.
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...