CoCoRo (Collective Cognitive Robots), swarm of autonomous underwater vehicles, Artificial Life Laboratory, University of Graz, Graz, Austria

https://youtu.be/nHzZFJ1cL5Y

TYOC#47/52: CEBIT

Published on Nov 22, 2015

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The Year of CoCoRo 47/52: In March 2014, we exhibited CoCoRo at the CEBIT in Hannover, Germany. This is Europe's largest consumer electronics fair. First we thought we might be too far off-topic and all the latest news on flatscreen TVs, smartphones and gaming consoles will just overshadow our exhibition. We were very wrong: We had the smallest booth and were overrun with thousands of people throughout the week. TV teams visited us and radio interviews followed each other. Our own internal estimate concluded that we might have had the highest rate of visitors per square meter in the whole fair. It is not easy to bring a swarm of underwater robots into such a fair and to show them running in live experiments. But we managed to do it and it was a huge thing for us, we still talk about those days often. Thanks to our enduring team members and also to all the people who visited us. The project gained a lot of motivation from the public interest we felt there.

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https://youtu.be/JEhaB9_GYd4

TYOC#48/52: Workshops

Published on Nov 29, 2015

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The Year of CoCoRo 48/52: During the runtime of the project we held a high number of workshops. These workshops were a driving force for the whole project because each international partner team had to bring their work in time to those workshops and we all together had to implement mechanical hardware, electronics and software into working installations. Almost all videos shown here in The Year of CoCoRo originate from such workshops, which were always focussing on one or several specific demonstrators. This form of workshop-driven development proved to be very successful, as at the end of the project we were able to show 17 working final demonstrators with our swarm. This allowed to demonstrate the versatility of robot swarms, as we demonstrate it also here in The Year of CoCoRo.

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https://youtu.be/WEIr7XtRLeI

TYOC#49/52: OVERVIEW Basestations of CoCoRo

Published on Dec 6, 2015

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The Year of CoCoRo 49/52: During the last year we showed many swarm algorithms in various experiments. The spotlights were always on the Lily and on the Jeff robots. However, there is another star in the team and this trailer is dedicated to this special agent: The base station! It was finished rather at the end of the project thus we had to develop (hack) many surrogates and placeholders for it over the course of the project. We got so experienced with it that we could quickly hack together a surrogate base station from almost everything that was laying around in the lab: Styrofoam, cans, boxes, ... whatever was around and came in handy. This video shows some of those creations. Finally, a few months before the final review, we had the real thing ready: A typical Italian machine (like Italian cars) made by our partners from SSSA (Pontedera): Fast as hell, highly maneuverable, just elegant. The base station has a docking device and can actively maneuver, dock and undock robots and carry three attached spare robots with it. With this central masterpiece we were ready for our final review.

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https://youtu.be/xFHzARcWr4E

TYOC#50/52: Overview Scalability

Published on Dec 13, 2015

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The Year of CoCoRo 50/52: With the research project CoCoRo we went a long way. We started with "pools" with a size of a few cubic centimeters and with naked electronics on the table. Throughout 3.5 years we extended the size scale and the number of robots steadily. We went through aquariums, pools of various sizes, threw our robots into ponds, rivers and lakes and finally ended our experiments in salt water in the basin of the harbor of Livorno. In retrospective, our number of robots increased by a factor of 40 and the volume of the waterbody we tested them in increased by a factor of 40 million. Quite some stretch for a small project. With our new project subCULTron, which extends the work of CoCoRo, we again scale up the swarm size (120+ robots) and the habitat size (Lagoon of Venice).

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https://youtu.be/lTVMHijQ7bE

TYOC#51/52: CoCoRo Big Vision

Published on Dec 20, 2015

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The Year of CoCoRo 51/52: This video shows the initial "big vision" trailer that we produced at the beginning of the project. It shows the basic components of the robotic system that we targeted (surface station, relay chain, ground swarm) and shows how we imagined our collective of underwater robots forming coherent swarms. The video was important for us to stay focussed in the project as it ensured that all project partners shared the same target goal for their work. The video is based on a small simulator, written by us to produce this video. However the simulator grew into a much more important tool: During the project this initial simulator was extended into a very useful simulator (including underwater physics with fluid dynamics) for simulating underwater swarms. It was used in evolutionary computation to find good shoaling behavior for our robots. Next week we will publish our final video in "THE YEAR OF COCORO" to show the whole system implemented on real underwater robots in a comparable setting and to show how our initial vision became reality.

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https://youtu.be/WjDeFzAGJSs

TYOC#52/52: Final demonstrator

Published on Dec 27, 2015

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The Year of CoCoRo 52/52: CoCoRo - The final goals were achieved. This video shows our final demonstrator as it was presented to our reviewers which then granted the CoCoRo project the grade "EXCELLENT" in their final assessment. This video shows the whole CoCoRo system working together: A base station, a "relay-chain" swarm and a search swarm on the ground. All of them communicating and interacting with each other.

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