SUNBIO brings together a significant variety of disciplines, aiming at exploiting them to form a set of ‘technology enablers’ that will facilitate the delivery of the envisioned services through a holistic framework, comprising Underwater Engineering, Mathematics and Analytics, Computer Science, Archaeology, Chemistry, further decomposed in: (i) Naval engineering and design; (ii) trustworthy data analytics and relevant intelligence (ML/AI frameworks); (iii) Chemical measurement and spectroscopic methods for sensing, (iv) Navigation principles and compliance, (v) Communication and remote operation. These disciplines will be exploited to set up a number of complementary Technology Enablers (also described in detail in Sect.1.2.1-1.2.2); these enablers will be the basis for the SUNBIO envisioned services, that will lead to efficiently applied fully autonomous and in situ sensing, monitoring services. SUNBIO aims at ensuring that the pathway towards robust monitoring principles and practices, is designed always having ‘human in the loop’ in terms of usability and acceptance of deployed technologies, given the fact that trustworthiness is a key factor towards the exploitation of the envisioned set of services.

Documentation and conservation of Underwater Cultural Heritage (UCH) is crucial to preserve humankind’s history and traditions, safeguarding tangible testimonies of past human life while ensuring its accessibility to present and future generations. TECTONIC project will promote an intersectoral collaboration between academic and non-academic professionals (such as technical experts, archaeologists, conservator, geologists, engineers, computer scientists) working in different topics related to the UCHs to respond and find solutions to the complex issues still existing in the field of UCH. The overall aim is the exchange of skills and expertise, the training activities for the implementation, improvement and assessment of innovative materials, techniques, tools and methodologies to develop solutions and marketable products for the conservation, restoration and management of the UCH (objects, artefacts, structures, remains etc.). To achieve its overall aim, TECTONIC project will undertake innovation and development activities driven by the following objectives: Study, documentation and 3D reconstruction of the selected pilot sites; Decision support tool for UCH risk assessment in a changing environment; Conservation studies, protocols and suitable procedures for preservation/conservation activities; Development of open and low-cost robotic solutions for the inspection, documentation and monitoring of UCH; Raising the public awareness and knowledge about the importance to preserve the underwater historical and archaeological heritage. All the objectives will be devoted to stimulate new ideas that would bring to the development of new marketable products by capitalizing on the research results that will be achieved in the project, creating a link between business, research and higher education.

The proposition in this project is to use autonomous platforms for remote monitoring and chemical mapping of underwater heritage sites, such as AUVs (Autonomous Underwater Vehicles), BUOYs (Unmanned Surface Vehicles) and ROVs (remote operated vehicles). A swarm of self-coordinated AUVs will be responsible to monitor, survey and scan the heritage sites for detecting/identifying and monitor degradation, state of the UW surrounding site, possible intervention actions for alarming conditions etc. The swarm of AUVs will embed high edge processing capacity to support operational autonomy, dynamic path planning, dynamic sample-strategy planning and coordinated-swarming towards overall low energy consumption and long mission endurance, according to the project mission goals. The proposed swarming concept foresees building common underwater consensus of the cultural site, through periodic bilateral communication between AUVs to mutually achieve the overall common surveying goal; while the mother BUOY will be responsible to collect and deeply analyze raw AUV information to provide enhanced site situation awareness insights to the external human supervisor/user. Furthermore, the BUOY will be equipped with renewable solar collectors to ensure continuous power availability and reduced mission’s footprint, enough to support the overall mission energy needs (AUV will be periodically powered through BUOY). The supervisor/user will be located in a remote monitoring station, onshore, to allow periodic mission lifecycle management and general overview of the whole system situation based on real-time visual analytic mechanisms