Minimalistic Approach Towards Underwater Swarm Robotic Development

Underwater systems are modern and challenging area of modern robotics. Underwater exploration is also crucial for investigating bio-marine species, monitoring pollution, and developing disaster warning system. The most significant part of the underwater exploration activities are sensing and measuring. In a dynamic environment, it is not sufficient to scan an area or volume with a single sensor [2][3][9]. Thus, many sensors those have wireless communication capabilities are deployed underwater to establish distributed sensing and to improve the measurement accuracy. Instead of using many static sensors, a group of autonomous underwater robots, defined as an underwater swarm robotic, can be applied together within the wireless sensor network to scale the measurement coverage and to perform self-deployed mechanism of the sensors by following the covering trajectory. Regarding the underwater robotic platform design, improving underwater communication bandwidth and developing a robust locomotion mechanism with limited power sources are quite challenging engineering aspect [8]. Therefore, from the scientific point of view, within the limited of communication bandwidth, the absent of global localization, and the hard underwater environment, finding appropriate cooperative algorithms and optimal communication algorithms among underwater swarm robots are also challenging [5][8]. The optimum required algorithms and the collective behavior of the robots may also be investigated from some bio-inspired underwater swarm behavior [5]. Therefore, in order to investigate and to invent desired algorithms for underwater swarms, simple robotic platforms are needed for experimental studies. There are many available experimental platforms for mini swarm robot in surfaces application in the market [2][9], but none of them can be applied underwater. The small size of underwater platform is necessary so that scientist can have his/her experiments in the lab relating to the collective algorithms to be implemented in the real size platform later. In this paper, a desired solution for developing small size underwater swarm robotic platform is shortly described. The appropriate solution offered is derived