The Year of CoCoRo Video #32/52: Combined scenario number one – target find

The EU-funded Collective Cognitive Robotics (CoCoRo) project has built a swarm of 41 autonomous underwater vehicles (AVs) that show collective cognition. Throughout 2015 – The Year of CoCoRo – we’ll be uploading a new weekly video detailing the latest stage in its development. This week, in another important phase of our “combined scenario #1, the Jeff robots perform a collective search on the water bed for a sunken metallic/magnetic target object.

We conducted an extra series of experiments on this phase of “combined scenario #1” to test the efficiency and robustness of the autonomous swarming behavior. When the object is located, other robots are recruited to the spot by horizontal blue-light signals, Ultimately, there’s an aggregation of Jeff robots around the target that marks the location for the Lily robots who then form a “relay chain” to the surface station.

Thomas Schmickl is an Associate Professor at Karl-Franzens University, Graz, Austria, and a lecturer at the University for Applied Sciences in St. Pölten, Austria.

Thomas Schmickl is an Associate Professor at Karl-Franzens University, Graz, Austria, and a lecturer at the University for Applied Sciences in St. Pölten, Austria.