Present status and achievements at the Swedish Maritime Robotics Centre SMaRC – An invitation to collaborate
SMaRC brings together key industrial and academic partners in an internationally unique collaborative environment. The vision is to demonstrate and enable technology transformation towards the next generation of maritime robots, that are able to operate in unknown environments for longer times and with less need for human intervention than what is currently possible. Focus is on four research areas, autonomy, endurance, perception, and underwater communication. Within these research areas, we will be working cross-disciplinary to develop a number of capabilities to address the future challenges.
SMaRC has already made some ground-breaking achievements by e.g. participating in the first ever under Twaites glacier expedition (Antarctica), and developing novel ways of combining machine learning and side-scan sonars to collect accurate bathymetry. SMaRC has built and performed sea-trials of two completely new AUV platforms. One with capacity to carry large sensor suites, battery packs, pay-loads and even drop objects, and one which is small, compact and agile with a fully integrated ROS-based software architecture and behaviour three mission execution structure for improved robustness and easy implementation and testing. SMaRC has developed and synthesised an open-source mission planning & simulation environment. The simulation environment is fully ROS compatible and is a digital twin of the ROS-based software architecture. Further, completely new “5-G” directive communication strategies for underwater communication are being developed and a prototype sensor is under testing. SMaRC has also developed and tested a small-scale modular DVL. Finally, a number of test sites around in Sweden are accessible for demonstrations and experiments (e.g. smarc algea-farm test site).