The Thesaurus Project, a long Range AUV for Extended Exploration, Surveillance and Monitoring of Archaeological Sites

Within the framework of the Thesaurus project (Italian acronym for "TecnicHe per l'Esplorazione Sottomarina Archeologica mediante l'Utilizzo di Robot aUtonomi in Sciami"), the authors have developed a low cost, multirole Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, briefly called Tifone, whose design is the main topic of this paper. According to the expected performances and specifications, the vehicle has to maintain a good autonomy and efficiency, typical features of an AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle), also maintaining high manoeuvrability and hovering capabilities, which are instead more common on ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles).Cooperative exploration and surveillance tasks involve the use of swarms of vehicles; the control, the mutual localization and communications among vehicles are fundamental tasks to be optimized. In particular, the optimization of costs with respect to benefits plays a critical role, considering that within the Thesaurus project a first fleet of three vehicles has to be developed. This work mainly deals with the different design phases of the vehicle and with the results of preliminary simulations and tests performed in the MDM laboratories, before the next lake (Roffia basin, between Pisa and Florence, Italy) and sea testing activities (Elba Island, Italy) that will be performed in spring and summer 2013.