A ROV for supporting the planned maintenance in underwater archaeological sites

Remotely Operated underwater Vehicles (ROVs) play an important role in a number of operations conducted in shallow and deep water (e.g.: exploration, survey, intervention, etc.), in several application fields like marine science, offshore construction, and underwater archeology. In this work we describe the preliminary steps in the development of the set-up of a special ROV addressed to perform the monitoring and the planned maintenance activities required to prevent the biological colonization in an underwater archeological site. In order to perform these operations, the ROV has been equipped with a custom arm and an opto-acoustic camera. To simultaneously satisfy position and force trajectory constraints, the vehicle-manipulator system is also controlled through a hybrid positionforce control scheme.