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

This video shows the CoCoRo swarm the largest autonomous swarm of underwater robots in the world.
The swarm is capable of collective behaviours such as cooperative search, finding the most inetersting place of the habitat, and making collective decisions.

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CoCoRo project Lily AUVs filmed with an underwater camera (Sony AS100V) in a pool.

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This video shows the CoCoRo autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in a large aquarium at the CeBIT exhibition.

This experimental setup simulates a real mission scenario in which the AUVs have to collectively find an object of potential interest at the sea floor (e.g., a black box of a crashed plane).

In the beginning the AUVs start randomly distributed in the mission area (= aquarium) where the object is assumed to be.
The AUVs do not perform a special search pattern but instead use a simple random walk. Due to the high number of AUVs, quite soon one of the AUVs will be near the object (in this case a magnetic target) and can perceive it.

The AUV then tries to keep its position above the object and starts to emit blue-light signals that attract other nearby AUVs which in turn also emit blue-light signals. This leads to a fast aggregation of most of the swarm AUVs near the object.
In future underwater swarms these AUVs could then collectively grab and lift the object to the water surface.

Project funded by European Commission FP7.

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The Year of CoCoRo 01/52: Our CoCoRo system consists of 3 types of robots. One is Jeff, a very fast and agile small autonomous swarm robot. This is an overview of its capabilities.

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The Year of CoCoRo 02/52: The CoCoRo system is currently the largest autonomous underwater swarm in the world. This video briefly shows some of its components and functions.

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The Year of CoCoRo 03/52: A swarm of Jeff robots is browsing the environment. They use their front blue-light sensors to detect and avoid obstacles.

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The Year of CoCoRo 04/52: In a complex underwater habitat a swarm of Jeff robots first searches for a magnetic target. Then the communicate to Lily robots at smaller depths to join the group.

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The Year of CoCoRo 05/52: Lily robots build swarms that change in size over time. By using a bio-inspired method of signal exchange these swarms can make reliable estimates of their own swarm size. Our Lily robots emit a pulsed signal that is relayed by other Lily robots in the swarm, just like slime mold amoebas or fireflies relay their signals in nature. Based on this simple signal exchange every member can estimate the number of other swarm members around.

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The Year of CoCoRo 06/52: It is important for our robot swarm that the swarm as a whole is aware of its size. We use a bio-inspired method, called the „fireslime algorithm“ to achieve this form of collective awareness. The algorithm makes the robots to spread a one-bit signal (pulse) among the swarm members allowing them to make quite reliable and precise estimates of the size of their swarm. This video shows an advanced version of the algorithm implemented on Jeff robots.

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The Year of CoCoRo 07/52: A group of Lily robots can achieve a coherent shoaling or flocking configuration by emitting and receiving pulsed light signals. Similar to slime mold or fireflies, such pulsed signals are relayed from one agent to the next, forming signal waves that move through the whole swarm. We use such waves to keep the swarm of Lily robots together as a group, to coordinate the swarm and to move it in a desired direction.

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The Year of CoCoRo 08/52: A swarm of Lily robots can form a coherent group by exchanging light pulses in a slime-mold inspired way among the group members. By modulating the frequency of these signals the group can alter the path of the emerging blinking wave to turn the whole group towards the aggregation target. Such a target can be any form of gradient emitting source, regardless of the type of the emitted signal. We demonstrate this here by using a light source as a target.

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The Year of CoCoRo 09/52: In this video we generate some water currents and turbulences by using a water hose in our outdoor pool. The video shows our first tests of the Jeff robot performed under such conditions (performed in summer 2013 and spring 2014). Those tests clearly indicated that the maneuverability of the robot (steering, forward drive) is strong enough to compensate for currents and drifts up to approximately 1m/sec. In those days we were very happy to realize such impressive capabilities for such a small robot, as this maneuverability is a prerequisite for the good performance in an underwater swarm under out-of-the lab conditions (large outside tanks, lazy river arms, ponds, lakes).

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The Year of CoCoRo 10/52: In this video we again generate water currents and turbulences by using a water hose in our outdoor pool. By radio-frequency control we navigate a Jeff robot remotely in those currents. To test the precision of the steering under these conditions we use some small magnets in our hands as targets that have to be picked up by the Jeff robot. Thus it looks like we feed the robot with magnets

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The Year of CoCoRo 11/52: This video summarizes all out-of-the-lab activities in which we tested our robots (Lily and Jeff). There will be more detailed videos following throughout this year showing some of those activities more specifically. The activities shown here show autonomous robots in larger outdoor pools, ponds, lakes, rivers and ocean harbours. They act there either alone (e.g. as autonomous underwater camera agents) or in smaller groups (swarms).

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The Year of CoCoRo 12/52: One day in early 2014, at one of those long workshops, we stayed at a hotel that had a large and deep outside pool. It was a nice day in Italy, so what else could we do than taking a JEFF robot in autonomous driving mode to this pool and have some fun with it. It didn’t take long and more and more hotel guests gathered and watched. Special applause to Vega & Finn, the kids of the project coordinator, for helping with the filming (above and under the water), catching the robot and rescuing it sometimes from the ground after we pushed the robot beyond its limits.

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The Year of CoCoRo 13/52: Lily is an autonomously diving robot. After we attached an underwater camera onto of it, it became an autonomously driving camera agent. We used this „Lily-Cam“ to look into the little fishing ponds that we have at our Zoological Department. The look below the surface offered a fascinating glimpse of the underwater world, including „algae forrests“, fish and other water organisms.

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The Year of CoCoRo 14/52: After our successful application of „Lily-Cam“ in our small ponds, we went further. At several lovely places at Styria (Austria) we took a look below the water surface and encountered beautiful and pittoresque landscapes, fish and even diving ducks.

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The Year of CoCoRo 15/52: There are not only beautiful lakes in Austria. There are also wild rivers and creeks. After „Lily-Cam“ did its job in the lakes, we threw it also into a fast whitewater river. We were lucky to catch it downhill after some minutes and the robot survived this adventure. However, our engineers, who have also to constantly maintain and repair the robots, didn’t like to see such movies ;-)

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The Year of CoCoRo 16/52: Jeff is much more agile and powerful then Lily. So mounting a camera ontop of an autonomous Jeff robot produced an even better autonomous camera agent. After some preliminary tests and tuning in a pool, we went to an Italian lake to see how it looks down there below the surface.

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