ROMEO: a versatile unmanned underwater vehicle for marine research

This paper introduces ROMEO, the latest unmanned underwater vehicle planned and developed at CNR-IAN. ROMEO is now in the early stages of development and is designed to overcome the limitations of the previous prototypes, setting a new standard in experimental projects that combine technological and scientific themes. The aim is to construct an extremely flexible testbed vehicle which may easily be applied to a variety of tasks both in the fields of robotics and marine sciences. In fact, the complexity of the problems to be faced in undersea robotics, as well as the level of investment involved in developing and testing new tools clearly indicate that priority should be given to research which has prospects for practical application. This implies obtaining feedback from final users and, in practice, letting applications direct technological progress. The result is a mixed-power (batteries/tether) openframe vehicle which has a substantial payload capacity and can be connected to a surface LAN through the tether. The system´s potential is multi-faceted. From a physical viewpoint, it can either operate in ROV (master-slave) mode or in AUV (tethered or untethered) mode. In operational terms, it can be equipped with additional measurement, sampling and analysis subsystems developed by the users themselves on the basis of very simple interface specifications, and can be interfaced and controlled via ethernet