The RUVIFIST project: preliminary experimental results with a Reconfigurable Underwater Vehicle for Inspection, Free Floating Intervention, and Survey Tasks

The development of vehicles incorporating both the Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) and the Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROV) intervention functionalities can be considered one of the most investigated tasks of the underwater industry and the scientific community. A feasible solution can be the development of Autonomous Underwater Reconfigurable Vehicles (AURVs), i.e. vehicles that can change their current configuration depending on the demanded task. Driven by these considerations, an innovative AURV has been developed by the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Florence (DIEF), Italy, capable of efficiently reconfiguring its shape according to the task at hand. In particular, the RUVIFIST (Reconfigurable Underwater Vehicle for Inspection, Free-floating Intervention and Survey Tasks) vehicle has been provided with two extreme configurations: a slender ("survey") configuration for long navigation tasks and a stocky ("hovering") configuration designed for challenging goals as intervention operations. Consequently, this work presents the results obtained during several experimental campaigns conducted to accurately test the vehicle reconfigurable system and how the standard Guidance, Navigation and Control (GNC) strategies must be adapted for AURVs.