ARAMIS CSDACS design, development and integration with Romeo

The ARAMIS Project (Advanced ROV package for Automatic Mobile Inspection of Sediments), funded by the European Union, aims to develop 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 system consists of 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 partly devoted to the supervisory control of the ROV motion and of the scientific devices´ sampling activities, and partly devoted to the acoustic and video image processing and to the interfaces for pilot and scientists. The ARAMIS system capabilities are being demonstrated by operating the system with a couple of ROVs developed for scientific applications: the deep-water ROV Victor 6000 developed by IFREMER, and the mid-water Romeo developed by CNR-IAN. This paper focuses on the CNR-LAN activity in the first two years of the ARAMIS Project, i.e. on the design and development of the ARAMIS Core Skid data acquisition and control system (CSDACS), and on the integration of the ARAMIS system with Romeo