Underwater Robots - Gianluca Antonelli.pdf

2 1. Introduction
Maybe the first idea ofanunderwater machine is from Aristotle; following
the legend he built amachine: skaphe andros (boat-man) that allowed Alexander
the Great (Alexander III of Macedon, 356 − 323 b. C.) tostay indeep
for at least half aday during the war ofTiro in 325 b.C.This is unrealistic,
of course, also considering that the Archimedes’s law was still tobecome a
reality (around 250 b.C.).
Fig. 1.2. Particular of the page of the Codice Atlantico containing the draw ofthe
manned underwater vehicle developed by Leonardo Da Vinci
In August, the 4th, 2005, inthe Pacific sea, in front ofthe Kamchatka, at
adepth of 200meters, aRussian manned submarine, the AS-28 ,got stacked
into the cables of aunderwater radar; atthat moment, seven men were in the
vehicle. One day later aBritish Remotely Operated Vehicle (ROV), Scorpio,
was there and, after another day of operations, it was possible to cut the
cables thus allowing the submarine to surface safely. Inaddition than exceptional
operations like the one mentioned, underwater robots can be used to
accomplish missions such assea bottom and pipeline survey, cable maintenance,
off-shore structures’ monitoring and maintenance, collect/release of
biological surveys. Currently, most of the operations mentioned above are
achieved via manned underwater vehicles orremotely operated vehicles; in
case of manipulation tasks, moreover, those are performed resorting toremotely
operated master-slave systems. The strong limit of the use of manned
vehicles isthe enormous cost and risk in working in such anhostile environment;
the daily operating cost is larger than 8000 € ( ≈ 10000 $) [323].
The aim of the research istoprogressively make itpossible to perform such
missions in acompletely autonomous way.