This project is funded by the European Union
New H2020 project "Submarine cultures perform long-term robotic exploration of unconventional environmental niches" (subCULTron; project ID 640967)
subCULTron aims for achieving long-term autonomy in a learning, self-regulating, self-sustaining underwater society/culture of robots in a high-impact application area: Venice, Italy.
Our heterogeneous system consists of 3 different agent types:
Artificial mussels are novel class of underwater agents. We aim to push forward the edge of knowledge with novel sensors (electric sense/electro-communication), novel bio-inspired algorithms (underwater hives) and novel energy harvesting in underwater scenarios. We will improve the world’s record for swarm-size in autonomous collective underwater robotics by almost one order of magnitude. Our application field is a human- and animal-co-inhabited real-world environment of high impact: Venice canals & lagoon. These habitats are highly dynamic and structured, expected to be reflected by a spatial self-structuring of our mussel population. These sub-populations locally perform memetic or cultural learning algorithms on their specific local data. Thus our cultural evolution algorithms will promote sub-culture development, similar to the human society that does the same above the water level in parallel.
Overall, we aim for an artificial society underneath the water-surface to the service of a human society above the water.