An innovative cleaning tool for underwater soft cleaning operations

This work takes place in the framework of the EU FP7 funded ARROWS project. In ARROWS project, low-cost autonomous underwater vehicle technologies are adapted and developed to significantly reduce the costs of underwater archaeological operations, covering the full extent of archaeological campaign. The project aims to deal with underwater mapping, diagnosis and cleaning tasks. This paper, specifically, describes the development of a cleaning tool (CT) to be used in cleaning underwater archaeological sites. This cleaning tool will be exploited not only during research missions, but also for the periodic monitoring, controlling and maintenance activity of well-known underwater archaeological sites (e.g. periodic cleaning operations). In this paper, the design criteria, working principles, the design and the performance tests of the developed CT are explained in details. The performance results are discussed in the final section.