Robotic Swarm for Marine and Submarine Missions: Challenges and Perspectives

Underwater exploration and monitoring are particularly challenging for the absence of GPS, limited communications, high hydrodynamic pressure and harsh environmental conditions. Autonomous swarms of underwater robots can play a crucial role for missions such as wide area underwater exploration, environmental monitoring and inspection of existing engineering infrastructures, like oil and gas, and archaeological or historical sites, given their properties of scalability, robustness, flexibility, adaptability, enlarged perception and tasks’ parallelization. Driven by the need to understand the state of art and develop new solutions within the realization of a new swarm of underwater fishes1, we provide here a critical review of past and current projects of underwater swarms, focusing on sensors, mission tasks, algorithms, simulation environments and real life proofs of concept. Moreover, we analyze the research directions that can improve the impact of autonomous underwater swarms on environmental preservation and marine sustainable development, also considering the limiting factors imposed on these prospects.1This work is part of a new project “Heterogeneous Swarm of Underwater Autonomous Vehicles” funded by the Technology Innovation Institute and developed with Khalifa University, UAE