Robotics techniques for data acquisition in underwater archeology

摘要

The paper presents a procedural methodology for the cooperation, at various level, of UUV and human operators to extract, in a non invasive way, as much information as possible from an underwater archaeological site with minimal expenditure of time and resources. Traditional methodologies of exploration of underwater archaeological sites have been enhanced thanks to new technologies and the possibility given to the archaeologist to promptly have a global information about the whole area of interest. In particular, in the paper, techniques for constructing augmented maps of the sites are illustrated. In the present approach, augmented maps are made accessible in real time to the archaeologist supervisor by means of a friendly interface. This allows to inform promptly the operators about the actual progresses of the survey, so that corrective actions can be eventually triggered on line. Furthermore, the possibility to contextualize the present survey data on wider scale maps (GIS) significantly enhances the global situation awareness of the archaeologists by pointing out correlations with the territory and with other sites. The experiences gathered on several missions on different archaeological sites have confirmed that the developed procedures guarantee an efficient and cost effective automation of the marine archaeologists’ work.