Development of standard test methods for evaluation of ROV/AUV performance for emergency response applications

This paper discusses the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) efforts to develop standard test methods for aquatic response robot performance. Different remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) were used to evaluate the test methods and the tests were refined accordingly. Experiments were conducted in order to evaluate the validity of the test methods. Results of those experiments as well as future work are discussed herein.