The Year of CoCoRo Video #51/52: Big Vision

Our penultimate video features the initial “Big Vision” trailer we produced at the beginning of this project. The video showcases the basic components of the robotic system we targeted (surface station, relay chain, ground swarm) and how we imagined our collective of underwater robots forming coherent swarms.

Our “Big Vision” helped us stay focussed on the project, ensuring that all project partners shared the same goal for their work. We based the video on a small simulator, written by us. Little did we know that this simple simulator would develop into a critical tool that would eventually include underwater physics with fluid dynamics for simulating underwater swarms. The simulator was also used in evolutionary computation to find good shoaling behavior for our robots.

Next week we will be publishing our final video in the Year of the CoCoRo. Our finale will show the whole system on real underwater robots in a comparable setting and how our initial vision finally became reality!

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.

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.