Autonomous Underwater Robotics in Practice: Rosenxt Tests Franken-ROV and 3D SubSlam in Loano

How can an autonomous underwater vehicle rotate around all axes under current and still hold its position precisely? These and other questions prompted a team of experts from Rosenxt to travel to Loano in Italy to carry out a test run there under realistic conditions.

Loano lies directly on the Ligurian Sea, on the coast between Monaco and Genoa – a town of around 10,000 inhabitants where the Rosenxt team found ideal conditions: direct access to the sea and a well-developed harbor provided the right infrastructure to further advance the company's own developments in maritime robotics. One focus was a cube-shaped robot prototype, which was tested in a real environment for the first time. The aim was to find out how the vehicle behaves under current when rotating around its own axis or when it has to hold its position despite the current. Another focus of the expedition was the use of SubSlam, an underwater stereo camera with which underwater structures can be captured and reconstructed in 3D.

Successful mission under real-world conditions

"We were able to collect a lot of successful data and are very satisfied with the trip," says Franka Nauert, who was responsible for the mission on behalf of Rosenxt. "There are still a few areas for improvement, which we will now implement." The so-called "Franken-ROV" was deployed – a name that has nothing to do with the project manager, but goes back to the novel "Frankenstein": in this prototype, existing components and tools were deliberately combined to create a flexible test system.

"What I find particularly impressive is that, despite the current, we were able to have our ROV travel a defined route autonomously and that the cube-shaped ROV was able to rotate in all directions," Nauert sums up. In addition, a shipwreck at a depth of around 25 meters was mapped using a 3D scan – a vessel that was sunk by aircraft fire during the Second World War.

These and many other insights from the deployment in Loano provide valuable data for the further development of autonomous underwater vehicles and tools for subsea applications. They help to test technologies for demanding maritime environments in a practical setting and to optimize them specifically for future missions.