Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are becoming increasingly important for different types of industrial applications. The generally high cost of (AUVs) restricts the access to them and therefore advances in research and technological development. However, recent advances have led to lower cost commercially available Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs), which present a platform that can be enhanced to enable a high degree of autonomy, similar to that of a high-end (AUV). In this article, we present how a low-cost commercial-off-the-shelf (ROV) can be used as a foundation for developing versatile and affordable (AUVs). We introduce the required hardware modifications to obtain a system capable of autonomous operations as well as the necessary software modules. Additionally, we present a set of use cases exhibiting the versatility of the developed platform for intervention and mapping tasks.
@article{arxiv.2108.05792,
title = {From market-ready ROVs to low-cost AUVs},
author = {Jonatan Scharff Willners and Ignacio Carlucho and Tomasz Łuczyński and Sean Katagiri and Chandler Lemoine and Joshua Roe and Dylan Stephens and Shida Xu and Yaniel Carreno and Èric Pairet and Corina Barbalata and Yvan Petillot and Sen Wang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2108.05792},
year = {2021}
}