Exploration of Underwater Environments with a Swarm of Heterogeneous Surface Robots

The main goal of swarm robotics is to control a large number of robots that interact together without a central controller. Swarm systems have a broad range of application areas, including the exploration and monitoring of extreme environments. This paper proposes a new approach to the coordination of a leader-follower system for use by a swarm of surface robots that are focused on the exploration of an unknown environment. The leader robot is controlled semi-autonomously by receiving a trajectory from a user and the swarm followers are then coordinated by a bio-inspired collective motion adapted from the state-of-the-art model, Active Elastic Sheet. To implement the proposed swarm controller, an open-source simulation platform, Gazebo, was used where the leader and follower robots, as well as a pond containing water, were simulated. The results demonstrate the feasibility of using the proposed swarm system in exploration applications.