Cooperative Cognitive Control for
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
(Co3-AUVs)
Summary
Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) represent one of the most
challenging frontiers for robotics research. AUVs work in an unstructured
environment and face unique perception, decision, control and communications
difficulties. Currently, the state of the art is dominated by single
AUVs limited to open-sea preplanned trajectories with offline postprocessing
of the data gathered during the mission. The use of multiple AUVs
as propagated in this project is still in a very early research
phase. Some of the research issues addressed in this project are
even completely uncharted territory, especially the development
of functionalities to seamlessly monitor critical underwater infrastructures
and to detect anomalous situations (e.g., missions related to harbour
safety and security) and the study of advanced AUVs capable of interacting
with humans to perform such functions as companion/support platforms
during scientific and commercial dives.
The aim of the Co3-AUVs project is to develop, implement and test
advanced cognitive systems for coordination and cooperative control
of multiple AUVs. Several aspects will be investigated including
3D perception and mapping, cooperative situation awareness, deliberation
and navigation as well as behavioral control strictly linked with
the underwater communication challenges. As a result, the team of
AUVs will cooperate in challenging scenarios in the execution of
missions where all data is processed online. In doing so, the team
will be robust with respect to failures and environmental changes.
These key features will be tested in a harbor scenario where additional
difficulties with respect to open sea applications arise and in
a human diver assistance scenario that also illustrates human robot
interaction issues.
The research activities in the project are structured into the
mail work-packages Cooperative World Modeling,
Cooperative Mission Execution, and
Cooperative Skills. The project also
includes work on a Simulator as
well as joined experiments in the form of Demonstrators.
Project Type
EU FP-7, ICT Challenge 2: Cognitive Systems, Interaction, Robotics
Collaborative Project (STREP), Grant agreement No: IST-231378
|
|
