The EU-funded Collective Cognitive Robotics (CoCoRo) project has built a swarm of 41 autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that show collective cognition. Throughout 2015 – The Year of CoCoRo – we will be uploading a new weekly video detailing the latest stage in its development. This video shows autonomous Jeff robots as they explore a complex debris field.

The important issue here is the area coverage that can be achieved by the autonomous motion behavior. We found that a simple program called “correlated random walk with obstacle avoidance” does the job quite well. This program is straight forward motion altered by infrequent randomly triggered random turns and collision avoidance based on blue-light emissions and reflection at the nose of the robot. One robot covers the habitat quickly, and more robots do it even faster. This scalability is important to generate a useful robot swarm.