Romeo-ARAMIS Integration and Sea Trials

This paper deals with the integration and sea trials of Romeo, a latest generation ROV for scientific applications and robotics research, and ARAMIS, a scientific and technological system to be integrated with typical mid-class existing ROVs to carry out pelagic and benthic investigations both in shallow and deep waters. The ARAMIS project (Advanced ROV package for Automatic Mobile Inspection of Sediments), funded by the European Union, developed a system constituted by a subsea module, i.e. a toolsled equipped with the technological and scientific instruments and their dedicated data acquisition and control system, and a surface station, i.e. a network of computers devoted to: i) the supervisory control of the ROV motion and of the scientific devices' sampling activities, ii) the acoustic and video image processing, iii) the interfaces for pilot and scientists. The ARAMIS system capabilities have been demonstrated by operating the system with a couple of ROVs designed for scientific applications: the deep-water ROV Victor 6000 developed by IFREMER, and the mid-water ROV Romeo developed by CNR-IAN. The integration of the ARAMIS system with Romeo, the design and development of the ARAMIS Core Skid data acquisition and control system (CSDACS), and the execution of the trials in the thermal vent areas near the island of Milos in the Aegean Sea during the ARAMIS' final demo with the medium size ROV are presented and discussed.