The Year of CoCoRo Video #27/52: Jeff target find in a large pool

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’ll be uploading a new weekly video detailing the latest stage in its development. This video shows four autonomous Jeff robots performing a random-walk based search program in a large pool.

After we tested our search algorithm for magnetic targets in the small pool, we set out for one with several times the water volume. This time, we used four Jeff robots, performing a random-walk based search program. Although we experienced many problems during the  long night of the experiment, we did achieve some success with this extended search scenario. Our issues were mostly software related: the robots were running along cyclic trajectories instead of doing an efficient random walk. These were problems which we experienced in early summer 2014 and later in the year we made significant progress, as later videos will show. Although the finding rate was not perfect, the robots still managed to locate the target on several occasions, and it was the first time we operated our robots successfully at depths below 2m.

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.