From market-ready ROVs to low-cost AUVs

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are becoming increasingly important for different types of industrial applications. The generally high cost of AUVs restricts the access to them and therefore advances in research and technological development. However, recent advances have led to lower cost commercially available Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs), which present a platform that can be enhanced to enable a high degree of autonomy, similar to that of a high-end AUV. In this article, we present how a low-cost commercial-off-the-shelf ROV can be used as a foundation for developing versatile and affordable AUVs. We introduce the required hardware modifications to obtain a system capable of autonomous operations as well as the necessary software modules. Additionally, we present a set of use cases exhibiting the versatility of the developed platform for intervention and mapping tasks.