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Systematic autonomous remote surveying of underwater cultural heritage monuments and artefacts using non-destructive, cost-effective and transportable digital solutions

Project description

Digital solutions for remote heritage monuments’ monitoring

Underwater cultural heritage monuments and artefacts require advanced surveying techniques. Digitalisation facilitates systematic, autonomous, and remote surveying. The EU-funded NERITES project will use autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), unmanned surface vehicles (BUOYs), and remote-operated vehicles (ROVs) for the remote monitoring and chemical mapping of underwater heritage sites. A swarm of self-coordinated AUVs will monitor, survey, and scan the heritage sites to identify degradation and monitor the state of the surrounding underwater site. BUOYs will collect and analyse raw AUV information and be equipped with renewable solar collectors to ensure continuous power availability. Meanwhile, supervisors/users will be stationed remotely onshore for periodic mission lifecycle management and a general overview of the system situation.

Objective

The proposition in this project is to use autonomous platforms for remote monitoring and chemical mapping of underwater heritage sites, such as AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles), BUOYs (Unmanned Surface Vehicles) and ROVs (remote operated vehicles). A swarm of self-coordinated AUVs will be responsible to monitor, survey and scan the heritage sites for detecting/identifying and monitor degradation, state of the UW surrounding site, possible intervention actions for alarming conditions etc. The swarm of AUVs will embed high edge processing capacity to support operational autonomy, dynamic path planning, dynamic sample-strategy planning and coordinated-swarming towards overall low energy consumption and long mission endurance, according to the project mission goals. The proposed swarming concept foresees building common underwater consensus of the cultural site, through periodic bilateral communication between AUVs to mutually achieve the overall common surveying goal; while the mother BUOY will be responsible to collect and deeply analyze raw AUV information to provide enhanced site situation awareness insights to the external human supervisor/user. Furthermore, the BUOY will be equipped with renewable solar collectors to ensure continuous power availability and reduced mission’s footprint, enough to support the overall mission energy needs (AUV will be periodically powered through BUOY). The supervisor/user will be located in a remote monitoring station, onshore, to allow periodic mission lifecycle management and general overview of the whole system situation based on real-time visual analytic mechanisms

Coordinator

LZH LASERZENTRUM HANNOVER EV
Net EU contribution
€ 672 125,00
Address
HOLLERITHALLEE 8
30419 Hannover
Germany

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Region
Niedersachsen Hannover Region Hannover
Activity type
Research Organisations
Links
Total cost
€ 672 125,00

Participants (11)

Partners (1)