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 proposed methodology shows that satisfactory level of efficiency, efficacy and quality can be obtained and, what is more important, these advantages can be obtained without the use of extremely expensive equipments.