Articles by Rupert Gieti

This paper presents an overview on the development and use of open hardware devices in archaeology and their operation in extreme conditions. State-of-the-art technologies are analysed, based on the working experience of the Arc-Team company, which, in 2006, started up a new branch of research, informally called Archeorobotics. The research was initially focused on open hardware radio-controlled UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle); over time different devices were developed, like ROV (Remotely Operated underwater Vehicle), USV (Unmanned Surface Vehicle), CNC (Computer Numerical Control) machine and other electronic and mechanical tools.

The “Castellum Vervassium” project concerns a series of archaeological investigations regarding the landscape around an ancient settlement now known with the name of Vervò (Val di Non, Trentino, Italy). Among the different analyses (excavation, survey, remote sensing, etc.), in 2010 a sub-project was started to reconstruct a hypothetical ancient road network inside the target landscape. In order to optimize the scientific process, the entire research project was divided into three steps: a topographic study conducted with classical methodology, the determination of the least cost path through LIDAR data and the development of a WebGIS to improve scientific publication of the final result. Every single phase of the work-flow was supported by specific Free/Libre and Open Source software applications. During the classical topographic study, the simple and light GIS OpenJUMP was used to improve precision and to avoid time consuming operations with cartography (without compromising user control in qualitative analyses). For more complex quantity analyses, the software GRASS granted a high quality, mainly thanks to its modular structure. This program satisfied our needs in determining the least cost path between main nodes of the road network and managed huge amount of data analysing a LIDAR DTM of 1 meter accuracy. A WebGIS, based on GeoServer and OpenLayer, made it possible to share the basic topographic and archaeological information of the project with the community. This type of flexible media was the best choice for offering broad access to the data, thanks to different filters and pre-built queries that simplify the internal browsing of the system.

After years spent in developing FLOSS we have reached a high quality level in computational archaeology, and therefore, in 2008 we focused our research on OS hardware projects to develop our data acquisition methodology. In this article we present our experiments in building a drone for aerial documentation..