The Year of the CoCoRo Video #20/52: Autonomous docking with Jeff robots

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 the Jeff robots docking and undocking autonomously with the surface station.

For the sake of achieving long-term energy autonomy with our CoCoRo system, we constructed a docking/undocking mechanism for Jeff robots on our surface station. This functionality was first tested with a fixed mounted docking device, and then with a docking device floating around in our pool. The autonomous docking worked exceptionally well under all conditions.

To learn more about the project, see this introductory post, or check out all the videos from the Year of CoCoRo on Robohub.

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.