An odd underwater ballet was unfolding within the Mediterranean port of Toulon these past few days.
Under the scrutiny in their masters, whose eyes are glued to computer screens, the world’s first fleet of “marine drones” is being put through its paces.
Five European countries — France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Portugal — have sent prototypes here under a four-year, four-million-euro ($5.32-million) programme to construct a squad of unmanned underwater rovers.
Deployed from a surface vessel, but communicating among themselves and using artificial intelligence, the wireless scouts would unfolded in a surveillance network.
Using video cameras and echo sounders, the explorers would help to create 3D maps of underwater terrain, benefiting oceanographers, archaeologists, offshore oil and gas drillers, pollution monitors, marine biologists and other civilian users.
But there’s an obvious naval use too, for a versatile network of small, hard-to-detect drones would multiply the surveillance capacity against mines and other threats.
“Underwater robots aren’t new — we’ve been curious about them for years,” said Vincent Rigaud, director of underwater systems on the French Institute for Research for Exploitation of the ocean (Ifremer), among the world’s top names in oceanography.
“What is new, though, is making a fleet of them, with autonomous capacity.”
Achieving this suggests overcoming two major hurdles, Rigaud explained.
One is software: creating artificial intelligence programmes that give the choices for cooperating in a set and managing the uncertainties of the marine environment, with its tides and currents.
The other is communications. Airborne drones can check with one another, and to their controller, by the moment process of radio.
But radio waves don’t penetrate underwater, which leaves sound your best option for communication a number of the marine drones.
Rather like a college of dolphins chirping to one another, the robots use acoustic signals to swap information and directions — and as experiments have shown, this isn’t a simple thing.
The communication is frustratingly long for the reason that data flow is so slow, and the tenuous sound link is definitely disrupted by other sources of noise, comparable to a passing vessel.
“It’s like going back to modems within the dawn of the pc age,” said Pere Ridao of the University of Girona in Spain.
“The maximum flow rate is ready 100,000 times slower than a normal ADSL connection. It takes several minutes to send an image.”
On a mission, the robots would share a coarse map of the underwater terrain, showing major obstacles to bypass, but would then work by themselves within designated parameters.
What they see and monitor will be stored in onboard memories which might then be downloaded once they are recovered. Powerful computers would crunch the raw data into useable applications.
“The vehicles should not physically connected but virtually connected,” explained Antonio Pascoal, a professor at Portugal’s Superior Technical Institute (IST).
“The idea is for them to dialogue and adapt to marine geometry without human intervention.”
The programme, called MORPH (Marine Robotic System of Self-Organizing, Logically Linked Physical Nodes), was launched in February 2012 with the assistance of the eu Commission. Thirty-two scientists are participating.
Things are still at an early stage, with as much as five machines learning tips on how to move in formation in shallow water.
The models generally favour either a torpedo or a “sledge” design, reflecting at this conceptual stage the several notions for coping with mission requirements.
Italy, as an example, has a 31-kilo (66-pound) torpedo-shaped tiddler, designed by the NATO Undersea Research Center (NURC) in La Spezia, which may operate for eight hours in depths of as much as 80 metres (260 feet).
Spain’s 200-kilo (440-pound) Girona 500 comprises three rounded tubes driven by twin propellers, ready to operate at depths of as much as 500 meters (1,625 feet), also for eight hours, in keeping with the MORPH website (http://morph-project.eu/).
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