Can underwater robotics technology save submerged Cultural Heritage?
This addresses the problem of limited access and preservation for submerged Cultural Heritage sites, offering incremental improvements in cultural tourism and heritage management.
The paper explores how underwater robotics technology can enhance the economic, protective, and social aspects of submerged Cultural Heritage by enabling remote access and experiences, such as through remote museums, to overcome limitations like visitor capacity and accessibility.
Cultural Heritage can largely profit from the set of technologies that have recently been developed in Submarine Robotics. In this paper we focus on how underwater robotics and related technologies can be used to enhance economical fruition, control, protection and social impact of the cultural heritage. Robots allow on-line experience, in remote locations, realizing the remote museum concept as extension and enhancement of the virtual museum. These solutions push the cultural tourism beyond actual limits of the sites like the number of simultaneous visitors, the travelling costs, , the difficulties to access dangerous locations coming to a true, advanced fruition of the Cultural Heritage goods.