This paper outlines the specifications and basic design approach taken on the development of the Girona 500, an autonomous underwater vehicle whose most remarkable characteristic is its capacity to reconfigure for different tasks. The capabilities of this new vehicle range from different forms of seafloor survey to inspection and intervention tasks.

In this field note, we detail the operations and discuss the results of an experiment conducted in the unstructured environment of an underwater cave complex using an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). For this experiment, the AUV was equipped with two acoustic sonar sensors to simultaneously map the caves' horizontal and vertical surfaces. Although the caves' spatial complexity required AUV guidance by a diver, this field deployment successfully demonstrates a scan-matching algorithm in a simultaneous localization and mapping framework that significantly reduces and bounds the localization error for fully autonomous navigation. These methods are generalizable for AUV exploration in confined underwater environments where surfacing or predeployment of localization equipment is not feasible, and they may provide a useful step toward AUV utilization as a response tool in confined underwater disaster areas.

This paper describes a data set collected with an autonomous underwater vehicle testbed in the unstructured environment of an underwater cave complex. The vehicle is equipped with two mechanically scanned imaging sonar sensors to simultaneously map the caves horizontal and vertical surfaces, a Doppler velocity log, two inertial measurement units, a depth sensor, and a vertically mounted camera imaging the sea floor for ground truth validation at specific points. The testbed collected the data in July 2013, guided by a human diver, to sidestep autonomous navigation in a complex environment. For ease of use, the original robot operating system bag files are provided together with a version combining imagery and human-readable text files for processing on other environments.

This paper describes the use of a research-driven, highly reconfigurable autonomous underwater vehicle for surveying the site of the historical shipwreck of La Lune. This wreck, from the XVII century, lies in 90m of water near the coast of Toulon in France. The goal of this survey was to create a fast but detailed map of the site, to serve as a base map for subsequent archaeological intervention. The paper overviews the survey setup and the methods used to generate a high resolution optical map. It also highlights some of the important advantages that lightweight AUVs present for archaeological survey missions in terms of operational costs, survey time, the quality of both the acquired data and the mapping outcome, and access to deep sites that are not reachable by traditional archaeological methods.