There exists a continuous effort from the research community to increase the technological support available for use in ocean exploration and related tasks. This project aims to explore the idea of using swarms of small, cheap, semi-disposable robots for the localisation and tracking of underwater sound sources (e.g. sea mammals, sub-marines etc) through passive acoustic monitoring.
This is achieved by integrating the concepts of passive acoustic stationary hydrophone arrays with the novel ideas of cooperation algorithms and swarm intelligence. Furthermore, this project will be one of the first to test the effectiveness of the resulting swarm behaviour in the real world, not just in simulations.
By the end of the project, the robots of the swarm will be capable to disperse covering large areas, while looking for sources of sound. As soon as one or multiple sources are detected, the robots will begin to exchange information about them and track the in a cooperative manner.