The overall goal of the SWARMs project is to expand the use of underwater and surface vehicles (AUVs, ROVs, USVs) to facilitate the creation, planning and execution of maritime and offshore operations and missions. This will reduce the operational costs, increase the safety of tasks and of involved individuals, and expand the offshore sector.
SWARMs project aims to make AUVs, ROVs and USVs further accessible and useful, making autonomous maritime and offshore operations a viable option for new and existent industries:
- Enabling AUVs/ROVs to work in a cooperative mesh thus opening up new applications.
- Increasing the autonomy of AUVs/USVs and improving the usability of ROVs for the execution of simple and complex tasks, contributing to mission operations’ sophistication.
The general approach is to design and develop an integrated platform for a new generation of autonomous maritime and underwater operations, as a set of software/hardware components, adopted and incorporated into the current generation of maritime and underwater vehicles in order to improve autonomy, robustness, cost-effectiveness, and reliability of the offshore operations.
The main specific objectives of SWARMS are:
- Develop an environment characterization and coordination system.
- Design the necessary infrastructure for monitoring and controlling underwater industrial operations by prioritizing the integration and interoperability among upcoming and legacy AUV/ROV systems.
- A communication concept ensuring smooth functioning while also exploring new, innovative technologies based on acoustic underwater communication technologies to exchange information, and create a communication network between SWARMs elements.
- Define and apply a methodology for designing new operations
Test, validate and demonstrate the SWARMs platform solution, in different environmentally controlled scenarios.
