Exploration of Underwater Storage Facilities with Swarm of Micro-surface Robots

Swarm robotics is a decentralised mechanism used to coordinate a large group of simple robots. An exploration task means fully scanning an unknown area using a large number of robotic swarms. It has great potential for use in many real-world applications, such as monitoring extreme environments. Although there are many research studies on swarm exploration, the real-world scenarios of the swarm algorithm have not been fully investigated. This paper proposes a new application scenario for swarm exploration to monitor nuclear waste storage facilities. To coordinate the robotic swarm, the active elastic sheet model was utilised, which is a bio-inspired collective motion mechanism. We implemented the exploration scenario in a wet storage facility using a swarm of low-cost autonomous micro-surface robots, Bubbles. We developed a realistic kinematic model of the Bubble platform and implemented the exploration scenario using large swarm sizes. This paper showed the feasibility of using a low-cost robotic platform for this new application, although the accuracy of the path planning was not very high.