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Surveying the oceans’ floors represents at the same time a demanding and relevant task to operators concerned with marine biology, engineering or sunken cultural heritage preservation. Scientific researchers and concerned persons combine their effort to pursue optimized solutions aiming at the mapping of underwater areas, the detection of interesting objects and, in case of archeological survey mission, the safeguard of the detected sites. Among the typical tools exploited to perform the cited operations the Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) represent a validated and reliable technology. These vehicles are typically equipped with properly selected sensors that collect data from the surveyed environment. This data can be employed to detect and recognize targets of interest, such as manmade artifacts located on the seabed, both in an online or offline modality. The adopted approach consists in laying emphasis on the amount of regularity contained in the data, referring to the content of geometrical shapes or textural surface patterns. These features can be used to label the environment in terms of more or less interesting areas, where more interesting refers to higher chances of detecting the sought objects (such as man-made objects) in the surveyed area. This paper describes the methods developed to fulfill the purposes of mapping and object detection in the underwater scenario and presents some of the experimental results obtained by the implementation of the discussed techniques in the underwater archeology field.

4th IFAC Workshop on Navigation, Guidance and Control of Underwater Vehicles, NGCUV 2015; Girona; Spain; 28 April 2015 through 30 April 2015, ARchaeological RObot systems for the World's Seas (ARROWS) EU Project proposes to adapt and develop low-cost Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) technologies to significantly reduce the cost of archaeological operations, covering the full extent of archaeological campaign. ARROWS methodology is to identify the archaeologists requirements in all phases of the campaign and to propose related technological solutions. Starting from the necessities identified by archaeological project partners in collaboration with the Archaeology Advisory Group, a board composed of European archaeologists from outside ARROWS, the aim is the development of a heterogeneous team of cooperating AUVs capable of comply with a complete archaeological autonomous mission. Three new different AUVs have been designed in the framework of the project according to the archaeologists' indications: MARTA, characterized by a strong hardware modularity for ease of payload and propulsion systems configuration change; U-C AT, a turtle inspired bio-mimetic robot devoted to shipwreck penetration and A-Size AUV, a vehicle of small dimensions and weight easily deployable even by a single person. These three vehicles will cooperate within the project with AUVs already owned by ARROWS partners exploiting a distributed high-level control software based on the World Model Service (WMS), a storage system for the environment knowledge, updated in real-time through online payload data process, in the form of an ontology. The project includes also the development of a cleaning tool for well-known artifacts maintenance operations. The paper presents the current stage of the project that will lead to overall system final demonstrations, during Summer 2015, in two different scenarios, Sicily (Italy) and Baltic Sea (Estonia)., European AR-ROWS project (European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for Research grant agreement no.308724)