Acquisition of Geophysical Data in Shallow Water Environments Using Autonomous Vehicles: A Tool for Marine Geology, Archeology and Environmental Studies

The fast ongoing progress in the field of the “open content” technologies, i.e., those hardware and software resources designed and offered to a wide community by people belonging to the open-source culture movement, strengthened and fostered by the availability of low cost, highly performing electronic devices, is creating a “revolution” in the world of applied sciences. This is particularly true for waterborne geological-geophysical data acquisition in shallow water environments, such as marine coasts, lagoons, lakes and rivers, sites that preserve, in general, relatively continuous recent geological records. We presented some examples of geophysical data acquisition in different shallow water environments carried out by means of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) equipped with different sensors providing high-resolution images of the sediment–water interface and some tens of meters within the sediments. The tests indicate that these technologies can be employed to collect densely spaced grids of high-resolution data, quickly, efficiently and at a very low cost, allowing for execution of repeated surveys even in those areas not accessible through conventional systems. The intensive use of “open” technologies and software for data acquisition and processing has the potential of widening the application of these methods to an increasing audience of earth scientists studying geological processes in rapidly evolving environments.