DEMO: Multifunctional smart buoys as part of a heterogeneous marine robotic system on a monitoring mission

DEMO: Multifunctional smart buoys as part of a heterogeneous marine robotic system on a monitoring mission

Long-term inspection and monitoring of harbours, marinas, and aquaculture ecosystems, including pollution mapping and marine litter detection, is a highly relevant problem in the area of marine robotics. This demonstration aims to showcase a heterogeneous multi-robot system tackling this issue. A set of complementary platforms with different capabilities and functionalities is featured, forming a single environmental monitoring and surveying system: autonomous catamaran-like surface vehicles SWAMP (CNR-GENOVA) and Korkyra (UNIZG-FER) with the Blueye Pro ROV tethered to it are integrated into the Multifunctional Smart Buoy (UNIZG-FER) system of surface and underwater sensor units. The agents form an ad-hoc communication network spanning both underwater acoustic channels and surface WiFi comms. Blueye ROV collects visual data of the seafloor with an objective to find sea litter and other pollution factors, while acoustic sensor units monitor and report on water quality. ASV Korkyra is controlled to follow the ROV. Once sea litter is detected, its estimated georeferenced location is sent to the ASV SWAMP using the Smart Buoy as a relay, after which SWAMP moves to the given location. Besides serving as a hub transmitting relocation requests and points of interest, the buoy monitors the vehicles and sensor units during the entire length of the mission, collecting their telemetry, sensor, and status data over all communication channels, finally relaying it to be displayed on a user-friendly graphical IoT dashboard.

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Tutorials are consisted of introduction presentation of 30 minutes and hands-on part of 60min. Tutorial hands-on and demos are divided in three groups which will rotate together every hour: