The ARROWS project: adapting and developing robotics technologies for underwater archaeology
4th IFAC Workshop on Navigation, Guidance and Control of Underwater Vehicles, NGCUV 2015; Girona; Spain; 28 April 2015 through 30 April 2015
Piecewise planar underwater mosaicing
A commonly ignored problem in planar mosaics, yet often present in practice, is the selection of a reference homography reprojection frame where to attach the successive image frames of the mosaic. A bad choice for the reference frame can lead to severe distortions in the mosaic and can degenerate in incorrect configurations after some sequential frame concatenations. This problem is accentuated in uncontrolled underwater acquisition setups as those provided by AUVs or ROVs due to both the noisy trajectory of the acquisition vehicle — with roll and pitch shakes — and to the non-flat nature of the seabed which tends to break the planarity assumption implicit in the mosaic construction. These…
Design of a modular Autonomous Underwater Vehicle for archaeological investigations
MARTA (MARine Tool for Archaeology) is a modular AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle) designed and developed by the University of Florence in the framework of the ARROWS (ARchaeological RObot systems for the World's Seas) 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 Conv…