Introduction
Submarines
At its open day on 26 August 2006 the Australian National University displayed its Miniature Robot Submarines. What I am holding in my hand is not a scale model of the submarine, but a life size mockup. The submarines are about half a metre long, with five specially designed electric motors and propellers.
In place of the complex moving control surfaces of a conventional submarine, this unit uses the five motors to steer the craft. The intention is to have a large number of these submarines under computer control, cooperating to collect data under the ocean.
Uwe Zimmer with a Submarine
Scientific goals:
- A school of submersibles which allows for fault-tolerant, scalable coverage (in terms of exploration, searching, transportation, or monitoring) of ocean spaces ...
- Active and passive localization of individuals with respect to neighbouring submersibles as well as the whole group with respect to the environment.
- Dynamical communication and routing protocols, which explicitely consider and adapt the current knowledge about the physical 3-dimentional positions (including momentum and orientations) of individual stations.
- Bridging some more gaps between current dynamical systems theory and the reality of actual sensor spaces and timing constraints.
From: Serafina , Research School of Information Sciences and Engineering, ANU, 2005