The Year of CoCoRo Video #28/52: All magnet finding

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 video shows the robots finding magnetic targets.

A heterogeneous swarm of Lily robots, Jeff robots and a surrogate for a surface station were used for this experiment. The search target was again a magnetic target in a fragmented habitat. The Jeff robot first autonomously searches for the target, stops when it’s located and switches on its vertical blue-light and red LEDs. This attracts Lily robots browsing near the surface. They stop and recruit other Lily robots with their horizontal blue-light LEDs. This attracts even more Lily robots and establishes a positive feedback loop – a growing aggregation of robots. Ultimately, all the Lily robots aggregate at the target spot, together with the one that emulates 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.