From market-ready ROVs to low-cost AUVs

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are becoming increasingly important for different types of industrial applications. The generally high cost of AUVs restricts the access to them and therefore advances in research and technological development. However, recent advances have led to lower cost commercially available Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs), which present a platform that can be enhanced to enable a high degree of autonomy, similar to that of a high-end AUV. In this article, we present how a low-cost commercial-off-the-shelf ROV can be used as a foundation for developing versatile and affordable AUVs. We introduce the required hardware modifications to obtain a system capable of autonomous operations as well as the necessary software modules. Additionally, we present a set of use cases exhibiting the versatility of the developed platform for intervention and mapping tasks.

I. Introduction

ROVs were first used for recovering torpedoes in the 1950s. Since then the technology has been adopted by a multitude of industries as their main approach for subsea operations. These robots have been previously utilized for tasks as diverse as, drilling for mineral and rock sampling [1], video survey of oil and gas platforms [2] and measuring the roughness of the seabed [3]. However, continuous operation of ROVs can be costly as they require constant monitoring from an operator, who is connected with a tether to the ROV from a support ship [4]. Operating such a system can be extremely costly, with ships potentially being over £50M, and with reported costs of £30K per day [5]. Additionally, this imposes a risk to operators who need to perform the launch or recovery of the ROV on the deck, specially under rough weather.