Underwater robots equipped with artificial electric sense for the exploration of unconventional aquatic niches

International audienceThis article presents different use of the electric field perception in the context of underwater robot navigation. To illustrate the developed navigation behaviours we will introduce a recently launched european project named subCULTron and will show some simulation and experimentation results. The project sub- CULTron aims at achieving long-term collective robot exploration and monitoring of underwater environments. The demonstration will take place in the lagoon of Venice, a large shallow embayment composed of salt turbib water that represents a challenging environment for underwater robots as common sensor like vision or acoustic are difficult to handle. To overcome turbidity and confinement problems our robots will be equipped with artificial electric sensors that will be used as the main sensorial modality for navigation. Electric sense is a bio-inspired sense that has been developed by several species of fish living in turbib and confined underwater environment. In this paper, many different robotic behaviours based on the electric field perception will be presented, in particular we will address reactive navigation, object/robots detection, and object localization and estimation

subCULTron - Cultural Development as a Tool in Underwater Robotics

This paper presents the research done in the field of robotic cultural evolution in challenging real world environments. We hereby present these efforts, as part of project subCULTron, where we will create an artificial society of three cooperating sub-cultures of robotic agents operating in a challenging real-world habitat. We introduce the novel concept of “cultural learning”, which will allow a swarm of agents to locally adapt to a complex environment and exchange the information about this adaptation with other subgroups of agents. Main task of the presented robotic system is autonomous environmental monitoring including self organised task allocation and organisation of swarm movement processes. One main focus of the project is on the development and implementation of bio-inspired controllers, as well as novel bio-inspired sensor systems, communication principles, energy harvesting and morphological designs. The main scientific objective is to enable and study the emergence of a collective long-term autonomous cognitive system in which information survives the operational lifetime of individuals, allowing cross-generation learning of the society by self-optimising