RUVIFIST: Reconfigurable Underwater Vehicle for Inspection, Free-floating Intervention and Survey Tasks

The development of Autonomous Underwater Reconfigurable Vehicles (AURVs) with the capability of interacting with the surrounding environment and autonomously changing the configuration, according to the task at hand, can represent a real breakthrough in underwater system technologies. Driven by these considerations, an innovative AURV has been developed by the Department of Industrial Engineering of the University of Florence (DIEF), Italy, capable of efficiently reconfiguring its shape according to the task at hand. In particular, the RUVIFIST (Reconfigurable Underwater Vehicle for Inspection, Free-floating Intervention and Survey Tasks) vehicle has been provided with two extreme configurations: a slender ("survey") configuration for long navigation tasks, and a stocky ("hovering") configuration designed for challenging goals as intervention operations. Moreover, an accurate description of the overall vehicle is currently provided in this work, starting from the hardware architecture to the developed software framework