Forget Indiana Jones: Here Comes The Robot Archeologist

Forget Indiana Jones: Here Comes The Robot Archeologist

Nine years ago, in 2005, Juan A. Barceló of the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, published a paper called “A Science Fiction Tale? A robot called Archaeologist“. In it, he imagined the automatic archeologist, as a “robotic-ROV (Remotely Operated vehicle), able to move in the field, take samples, and build a model of the environment based on its interaction with it and the information is able to gather”. Less than a decade later this concept is much closer to become a reality than he could probably have thought.

“While still very futuristic – researcher Vittorio Amos Ziparo tells me – this vision is not so far fetched now. Today it’s possible to build robots that will automatically explore archaeological sites and build extremely accurate models of them. Sometimes, it’s also possible to obtain inferences from the model, in order to make diagnosis on how to preserve these very same sites.”

Ziparo knows what he’s talking about. He works for Algorithmica, a Rome-based startup, which is part of a consortium of several European partners (mostly German, Belgian and Italian universities), working together on the Eu funded Rovina Project, whose aim is to making surveying of cultural heritage sites faster, cheaper, and safer through the use of autonomous robots, which will enable 3D reconstructions of hazardous sites

“Four years ago, a colleague of mine, Giorgio Grisetti of La Sapienza – the project’s coordinator, University of Bonn’s professor Cyrill Stachniss tells Forbes – came with this idea of using robots to explore the catacombs of Rome. We obtained funding from the European Union and we started bringing together experts from different discipline.” The three and a half years project actually started in 2013 and three working prototypes have already been built so far, with the aim of being tested in Rome’s and Naples’s catacombs.

These very challenging environments are probably the best places in which to make this kind of experiments. They are still mostly unexplored, due to the high risk of collapse; even worse, on the lower levels, they often yield a high concentration of radioactive radon gas, making almost impossible for humans to remain underground for more than half an hour.

Not to mention steep slopes, uneven grounds, challenging obstacles, drifts and debris. Researcher therefore opted for a tracked robot, a modified version of the Mesa Element, a device which can carry heavy payloads – more than 50Kg – climb stairs and operate in all weather conditions.

On this base, they mounted a sensor suite for navigation and digital reconstruction: cameras, 3D laser scanners and an XSens device that includes gyroscopes, accelerometers and a magnetometer. A bit like the Google GOOGL -1.95% car does, the robot continuously takes pictures of its surroundings and elaborates them with a special software to build an overall image of the environment. The data collected during the exploration is then processed and stored in the cloud. The robot has already been tested, with good results, in the S. Priscilla catacombs, in Rome.

“At the moment, the platform is most of the time actually manually controlled. That means we have a person at the joystick steering the platform. But we want to have really autonomous operations, where we just bring the platform there, press the start button, and then the platform goes away and comes back after a couple of hours with the model,” Stachniss says.

Next step in the project will be to build a platform able to answer questions such as “where is it safe for me to go?”; “What are interesting areas to go to?”; “How do I go there?” Almost a robot with a consciousness, so to speak. Does that mean that human archaeologists will no longer be necessary, and robots will replace them, just like they did with other workers? Probably not. “While these research prototypes are a great support for archeologists, they aren’t really able to substitute them. These machines will instead do the risky parts, their best field of application being the so-called DDD (Dangerous, Dirty and Dull) jobs.” Ziparo says.

Robots themselves do make mistakes: they could inadvertently break some relics, miss something interesting, or launch false alarms. Human supervisions will still be necessary. Not to mention the fact that exploration is only a small part of an archeologist’s work: understanding and contextualizing the findings is another. And this kind of skills are not likely to be overtaken by our “robot overlords” anytime soon.