subCULTron

H2020 project (Finished) „Submarine cultures perform long-term robotic exploration of unconventional environmental niches“ (subCULTron; project ID 640967)

subCULTron aimed for achieving long-term autonomy in a learning, self-regulating, self-sustaining underwater society/culture of robots in a high-impact application area: Venice, Italy.

Our heterogeneous system consisted of 3 different agent types:

• On the sea-ground, artificial mussels are the collective long-term memory of the system, allowing information to stay beyond the runtime of other agents, thus allowing to continue learning from previously learned states. These mussels monitor the natural habitat, including biological agents like algae, bacterial incrustation and fish.
• On the water surface, artificial lily pads interface with the human society, delivering energy and information influx from ship traffic or satellite data.
• Between those two layers, artificial fish move/monitor/explore the environment and exchange info with the mussels and lily pads.

Artificial mussels are novel class of underwater agents. We developed novel sensors (electric sense/electro-communication), novel bio-inspired algorithms (underwater hives) and novel energy harvesting in underwater scenarios. Our application field is a human- and animal-co-inhabited real-world environment of high impact: Venice canals & lagoon.

The projet ended November 2019.