Underwater robotic vehicles for infrastructure inspections and environmental monitoring

The thesis is divided in three different parts which ideally follow the evolution of marine technologies during the last years in an approach which leads toward an increasing autonomy of the robotic vehicles and of the mission. Starting from a practical application, in which an established engineering approach has been used, in the first part a feasibility study of a towed semi-autonomous vehicle for underwater pipeline inspection is reported. Going through the second part, scientific and engineering innovations are applied to the design and the evolution of the Flaga, a prototypal AUV tailored to the needs of coastal oceanographic missions; eventually in the third part a new methodological mission driven approach is extended to a theoretical formulation of adaptive on line planning algorithms for environmental monitoring mission to be performed by a team of cooperative autonomous vehicles