In the eye of the storm : the Italian economy and the eurozone crisis

The eurozone crisis had a more significant and longer-lasting impact on Italy than on virtually any other member state, with the effects still visible a decade after. The extent of the shock was surprising in view of progress Italy had apparently made in the 1990s in terms of enhancing its capacity to meet the demands of European Monetary Union. The explanation for this traumatic economic experience lies in Italy’s deep, long-term, structural tensions which were placed under severe pressure during the 1990s and which were cracked open by the 2011 sovereign debt crisis. These have had long-standing economic effects as well as political ramifications in terms of a significant change in the Italy–EU relationship

The ARROWS project: Adapting and developing robotics technologies for underwater archaeology

ARchaeological RObot systems for the World's Seas (ARROWS) EU Project proposes to adapt and develop low-cost Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) technologies to significantly reduce the cost of archaeological operations, covering the full extent of archaeological campaign. ARROWS methodology is to identify the archaeologists requirements in all phases of the campaign and to propose related technological solutions. Starting from the necessities identified by archaeological project partners in collaboration with the Archaeology Advisory Group, a board composed of European archaeologists from outside ARROWS, the aim is the development of a heterogeneous team of cooperating AUVs capable of comply with a complete archaeological autonomous mission. Three new different AUVs have been designed in the framework of the project according to the archaeologists' indications: MARTA, characterized by a strong hardware modularity for ease of payload and propulsion systems configuration change; U-C AT, a turtle inspired bio-mimetic robot devoted to shipwreck penetration and A-Size AUV, a vehicle of small dimensions and weight easily deployable even by a single person. These three vehicles will cooperate within the project with AUVs already owned by ARROWS partners exploiting a distributed high-level control software based on the World Model Service (WMS), a storage system for the environment knowledge, updated in real-time through online payload data process, in the form of an ontology. The project includes also the development of a cleaning tool for well-known artifacts maintenance operations. The paper presents the current stage of the project that will lead to overall system final demonstrations, during Summer 2015, in two different scenarios, Sicily (Italy) and Baltic Sea (Estonia

The thesaurus project, a long range auv for extended exploration, surveillance and monitoring of archaeological sites

Within the framework of the Thesaurus project (Italian acronym for “TecnicHe per l’Esplorazione Sottomarina Archeologica mediante l’Utilizzo di Robot aUtonomi in Sciami”), the authors have developed a low cost, multirole Autonomous Underwater Vehicle, briefly called Tifone, whose design is the main topic of this paper. According to the expected performances and specifications, the vehicle has to maintain a good autonomy and efficiency, typical features of an AUV (Autonomous Underwater Vehicle), also maintaining high manoeuvrability and hovering capabilities, which are instead more common on ROVs (Remotely Operated Vehicles).Cooperative exploration and surveillance tasks involve the use of swarms of vehicles; the control, the mutual localization and communications among vehicles are fundamental tasks to be optimized. In particular, the optimization of costs with respect to benefits plays a critical role, considering that within the Thesaurus project a first fleet of three vehicles has to be developed. This work mainly deals with the different design phases of the vehicle and with the results of preliminary simulations and tests performed in the MDM laboratories, before the next lake (Roffia basin, between Pisa and Florence, Italy) and sea testing activities (Elba Island, Italy) that will be performed in spring and summer 2013