Unmanned underwater vehicles for scientific applications and robotics research: The ROMEO Project

The design, development and exploitation of Romeo, a last generation ROV capable of supporting robotics research on intelligent/autonomous vehicles and to execute scientific missions in very harsh environment, are presented. The system's mechanical and communication design is discussed with respect to basic end-user requirements. A three Local Area Networks system architecture is proposed, and the main sub-systems connected to the surface (supervision), on-board and lab Ethernet LANs are described. The vehicle's exploitation in scientific missions in harsh environment (Ross Sea in Antarctica), Internet-based mission control demonstrations and the integration with a multidisciplinary scientific and technological payload proved the capabilities of the proposed architecture in matching operational and research requirements.