The Year of CoCoRo Video #25/52: Autonomous underwater camera agent

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 a Jeff robot working as an underwater autonomous camera agent.

We put an underwater camera on one of our Jeff robots while it was diving autonomously in a structured, in fact highly fragmented habitat. This let us see what it looks like to be inside of the swarm and also if we can see into the hidden places by putting a camera on an autonomous, purely “random walking” robot. As we have already shown in previous weeks, we extended this approach also to natural habitats, including lakes and an ocean harbour. As shown in the video below, we tested the areal coverage of the swarm and saw how many interesting sites will be caught on camera.

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.