Exploration of Underwater Storage Facilities with Swarm of Micro-surface Robots

Swarm robotics is a decentralised mechanism used to coordinate a large group of simple robots. An exploration task means fully scanning an unknown area using a large number of robotic swarms. It has great potential for use in many real-world applications, such as monitoring extreme environments. Although there are many research studies on swarm exploration, the real-world scenarios of the swarm algorithm have not been fully investigated. This paper proposes a new application scenario for swarm exploration to monitor nuclear waste storage facilities. To coordinate the robotic swarm, the active elastic sheet model was utilised, which is a bio-inspired collective motion mechanism. We implemented the exploration scenario in a wet storage facility using a swarm of low-cost autonomous micro-surface robots, Bubbles. We developed a realistic kinematic model of the Bubble platform and implemented the exploration scenario using large swarm sizes. This paper showed the feasibility of using a low-cost robotic platform for this new application, although the accuracy of the path planning was not very high.

Automated summary

This paper investigates the application of swarm robotics in monitoring nuclear waste storage facilities. By utilizing the active elastic sheet model and low-cost autonomous micro-surface robots, we implemented the task of exploring unknown areas. Although the accuracy of path planning was not very high, we demonstrated the feasibility of using a low-cost robotic platform for this new application.