Underwater Robots Monitor Venice Lagoon ​

An international team of scientists has launched an unprecedented exploration project in the waterways beneath Venice with swarms of autonomous underwater robots.

The EU-funded project has designed three different bio-inspired robot species: an aPad robot floating on the water surface, an aFish swimming in shallow waters and an aMussel robot covering the seabed.

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Their role is to analyse and help protect the fragile ecosystem of the Venetian lagoon: the aMussel robots collect and store data, the aFish transports this data and the aPad brings the information to the surface.

Robust and flexible, the robots are designed to talk and listen to each other and to develop as a “self-organizing underwater swarm”, using bio-inspired algorithms influenced by nature.

Alexandre Campo, computer scientist at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, explains: “In lab environments, we study the behaviour of animals, especially social animals. We observe how the animal kingdom is organised. It’s not necessarily an organisation based on hierarchy. There are animals that communicate among themselves and share information. This is what we call “self-organisation”. So we try to understand this collective behaviour and to reproduce it by making models based on mathematical equations.”

One of the main challenges is to develop a communication system for the robots, as neither Wi-Fi nor GPS work underwater. The scientists have turned to sonar technologies, and have gone one step further.

Read full article: EuroNews

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