Secure Cooperation of Autonomous Mobile Sensors Using an Underwater Acoustic Network

Methodologies and algorithms are presented for the secure cooperation of a team of autonomous mobile underwater sensors, connected through an acoustic communication network, within surveillance and patrolling applications. In particular, the work proposes a cooperative algorithm in which the mobile underwater sensors (installed on Autonomous Underwater Vehicles—AUVs) respond to simple local rules based on the available information to perform the mission and maintain the communication link with the network (behavioral approach). The algorithm is intrinsically robust: with loss of communication among the vehicles the coverage performance (i.e., the mission goal) is degraded but not lost. The ensuing form of graceful degradation provides also a reactive measure against Denial of Service. The cooperative algorithm relies on the fact that the available information from the other sensors, though not necessarily complete, is trustworthy. To ensure trustworthiness, a security suite has been designed, specifically oriented to the underwater scenario, and in particular with the goal of reducing the communication overhead introduced by security in terms of number and size of messages. The paper gives implementation details on the integration between the security suite and the cooperative algorithm and provides statistics on the performance of the system as collected during the UAN project sea trial held in Trondheim, Norway, in May 2011

The Widely scalable Mobile Underwater Sonar Technology (WiMUST) H2020 project: first year status

The Widely scalable Mobile Underwater Sonar Technology (WiMUST) project aims at developing a system of cooperative Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) for geotechnical surveying and geophysical exploration. The paper reports about the first year activities and it gives an overview of the main objectives and methods. Results relative to distributed sensor array, cooperative control, mission planning, communications and preliminary experiments are summarized

Overview and first year progress of the Widely scalable Mobile Underwater Sonar Technology H2020 project

open20siPubblicazione su rivista di contributo a Convegno -10th IFAC Conference on Control Applications in Marine Systems (CAMS2016)The Widely scalable Mobile Underwater Sonar Technology (WiMUST) project is an H2020 Research and Innovation Action funded by the European Commission. The action's main goal is to develop robotic technologies exploiting Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) for geotechnical surveying and geophysical exploration. The paper briefly describes the project and its state of the art after the first year of activities.openIndiveri, Giovanni; Antonelli, Gianluca; Arrichiello, Filippo; Caffaz, Andrea; Caiti, Andrea; Casalino, Giuseppe; Volpi, Nicola Catenacci; de Jong, Ivan Bielic; De Palma, Daniela; Duarte, Henrique; Gomes, Joao Pedro; Grimsdale, Jonathan; Jesus, Sergio; Kebkal, Konstantin; Kelholt, Elbert; Pascoal, Antonio; Polani, Daniel; Pollini, Lorenzo; Simetti, Enrico; Turetta, AlessioIndiveri, Giovanni; Antonelli, Gianluca; Arrichiello, Filippo; Caffaz, Andrea; Caiti, Andrea; Casalino, Giuseppe; Volpi, Nicola Catenacci; de Jong, Ivan Bielic; De Palma, Daniela; Duarte, Henrique; Gomes, Joao Pedro; Grimsdale, Jonathan; Jesus, Sergio; Kebkal, Konstantin; Kelholt, Elbert; Pascoal, Antonio; Polani, Daniel; Pollini, Lorenzo; Simetti, Enrico; Turetta, Alessi

Widely scalable mobile underwater sonar technology: an overview of the H2020 WiMUST project

The Widely scalable Mobile Underwater Sonar Technology (WIMUST) project is an H2020 Research and Innovation Action funded by European Commission. The project aims at developing a system of cooperative autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) for geotechnical surveying and geophysical exploration. The paper describes the main objectives of the project, given an overview of the methodologies adopted to achieve them, and summarizes the work done in the first year of R&D work

The DIST-hand, an anthropomorphic, fully sensorized dextrous gripper

Abstract. This paper describes the features of the DIST-Hand dexterous gripper. The DIST-Hand is a mechanism constituted by fingers with 16 degrees of freedom and with a high degree of dexterity, designed for experiments in the area of grasping control, and Tele-manipulation. The current version of the gripper lightweight and can be easily installed on a various existing robots. Moreover we present solutions concerning the control of a device oriented to the fine manipulation and the development of a novel prototype of an integrated force and tactile sensor based on conductive rubber.

The CO³AUVs (Cooperative Cognitive Control for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles) project: Overview and current progressesOCEANS 2011 IEEE - Spain

"Cooperative Cognitive Control for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles" (Co3AUVs) is Collaborative Project (STREP) funded by the European Commission (EC) under the Seventh Framework Programme (FP7), "Information and Communication technologies" (ICT) Challenge 2: "Cognitive Systems, Interaction, Robotics". The aim of Co 3AUVs is to develop, implement and test advanced cognitive systems for coordination and cooperative control of multiple AUVs. Several aspects are investigated including 3D perception and mapping, cooperative situation awareness, deliberation and navigation as well as behavioral control strictly linked with the underwater communication challenges. This paper presents results from the first two years of the project, including the simulator, the development of vehicles and components, 2D as well as 3D underwater mapping, cooperative navigation and motion control, and cooperative skills

Underwater robot networks: communication and cooperation

Communication performance of two different acoustic communication network infrastructures as designed in the projects UAN and CO^3AUV are reported. Qualitative explanation of communication performance variations can be accounted, at least in the UAN experiment, by standard Transmission Loss computation. The implications on multi- robots cooperation in AUV distributed autonomous tasks are also discussed by using the AUVNetSim simulator initialized with the parameters as measured in the field data

Cooperative cognitive control for autonomous underwater vehicles (CO3AUVs): Overview and progresses in the 3rd project year

The paper describes the "Cooperative Cognitive Control for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (Co3AUVs)" EU-project. This is a 7th Framework Program STREP project under the theme: Information and Communication Technologies Cognitive Systems, Interaction, Robotics. The project duration is February 2009 to January 2012. The aim of Co3AUVs is to develop, implement and test advanced cognitive systems for coordination and cooperative control of multiple AUVs. Several aspects are investigated including 3D perception and mapping, cooperative situation awareness, deliberation and navigation as well as behavioral control strictly linked with the underwater communication challenges. This paper presents an overview of the project with a focus on results from the final 3rd project year

WAVE: A wave energy recovery module for long endurance gliders and AUVs

The WAVE (Wave-powered Autonomous Vehicle for marine Exploration) project involves the development of a novel hybrid oceanographic glider/Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) with power recharging capabilities from environmental renewable sources, aiming at enhancing the endurance of a typical marine mission. In this paper we present a brief description of the project, and the steps followed in the realization of the first version of the vehicle. The results emerged after a preliminary sea-trial of the prototype show the practical feasibility of the proposed approach