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 robot Jeff diving along a preprogrammed trajectory.

Our test of “dead reckoning” was performed by a Jeff robot in Livorno harbor. The robot was programmed to follow a straight-line trajectory, then perform a circular search pattern (including collision avoidance) and end with a direct return to the starting point. The robot used only a magnetic compass sensor, an internal clock and blue-light LEDs for collision avoidance. Considering the simplicity of the technology, we were surprised at how efficiently it performed, despite the currents in the harbor and occasional collision-avoidance behavior triggered by the buoys.