The RMS Titanic 1985 discovery expedition

Abstract

The RMS Titanic was tragicaly lost after collision with an iceberg during the night of the 14th and sank the 15th of April 1912. A FrenchAmerican team discovered her the 1st of September 1985 lying on the sea floor at a depth of 3800 meters. The two years of preparation are briefly described and followed by the description of the search and survey expedition from July to September 1985. The subsea systems used for this expedition were the towed sonar SAR of IFREMER and the towed optical vehicles ARGO and ANGUS of WHOI (Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution). For the first time, SAR and ARGO systems were used intensively in 85. Since then, they have been largely used for scientific missions. New deep sea explorations tools have also been developed since 85 which contribute to push the limits of the knowledge of our subsea environment.

The Amadeus project: an overview

“…Meanwhile undersea scientific and survey expeditions are increasingly utilizing tele-operated technology and ROVs (Alayse- Danet, 1990;Bergstroem et al, 1987;Bono et al, 1994;Dando et al, 1994;Etchemendy and Davis, 1991;Michel and Ballard, 1994;Newman and Robison, 1993). It has also been suggested that highly dextrous underwater manipulator systems are critical to the development of self-contained autonomous underwater vehicles (Yuh, 1995).…”

Monocular-Based 3-D Seafloor Reconstruction and Ortho-Mosaicing by Piecewise Planar Representation

“…By using a suitable search window that is adjusted locally based on the optical fl ow and its uncertainty, the probability of outliers is reduced while using small correlation windows. We also avoid the need 1 We use this term loosely to imply strong local texture. for higher-order transformations, e.g., affine or projective, that may often be necessary within regions of high surface relief.…”

“…Visual surveys have become an important component of seafloor mapping for scientific studies; e.g., [1], [2]. Developments in HDTV and very-high resolution digital systems have enabled the imaging of benthic habitats with unprecedented details, thus offering tremendous potential for exploration and new discoveries in various domains of marine sciences, including biology, geology and archeology.…”