CoCoRo

This ambitious project aims at creating a swarm of interacting, cognitive, autonomous robots. We will develop a swarm of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) that are able to interact with each other and which can balance tasks (interactions between/within swarms). These tasks are: ecological monitoring, searching, maintaining, exploring and harvesting resources in underwater habitats. The swarm will maintain swarm integrity under conditions of dynamically changing environments and will therefore require robustness and flexibility. This will be achieved by letting the AUVs interact with each other and exchange information, resulting in a cognitive system that is aware of its environment, of local individual goals and threats and of global swarm-level goals and threats. By a combination of locally acting and globally acting self-organizing mechanisms, information from the global level flows into the local level and influences the behaviour of individual AUVs. The usage of cognition-generating algorithms can allow robotic swarms to mimic each other's behaviour and to learn from each other adequate reactions to environmental changes. In addition, we plan to investigate the emergence of artificial collective pre-consciousness, which leads to self-identification and further improvement of collective performance. In this way we explore several general principles of swarm-level cognition and can assess their importance in real-world applications.