The supervisory control of ARAMIS, a system for robotic inspection of sediments

To address the needs of state of the art scientific investigations and to improve the efficiency and economy of marine data collection, an innovative system, ARAMIS (Advanced ROV package for Automatic Mobile Investigation of Sediments), has been developed with the support of EC MAST III program. ARAMIS is a scientific and technological package to be integrated with typical mid class Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) to form a highly automated scientific tool for carrying out multidisciplinary missions. Several processing units and a Man-Machine Interface (MMI) connected in a Local Area Network compose the ARAMIS surface control equipment. The supervisory control system is the heart of the surface equipment. It gets and processes information and data provided by all the other processing units allowing the pilot/scientist to execute high level commands to move the ROV in an efficient, reliable and repeatable way. In this way, the navigation control capabilities of the ROV are considerably enhanced by automatic functions such as: automatic swim to a position; automatic navigation along a transect at a given bottom distance; automatic station keeping; automatic swim around a static target; automatic landing on the sea bottom; automatic obstacle detection and avoidance. This paper focuses on the ARAMIS supervisory control system and provides a synthetic description of the overall system.