Optical-guided autonomous docking method for underwater reconfigurable robot

This paper introduces the application of blue light sensor for guiding an individual AUV to dock to another one in clear water environment. Thanks to this method, an underwater reconfigurable robot can evolve from swarm mode into organism mode to perform other embodiment and locomotion mechanisms. Compared to classical sonar systems, the advantage of using blue light is the robustness to the multi robot interferences, the compactness of the hardware system, and the capability to ensure a high bandwidth communication. This ultimately enable the integration into miniaturized and low cost underwater swarm robotic platform. Experiments validate the proposed docking procedure demonstrating the working principles of the selected docking method and sensory system that work at an inter-robot initial distance up to five times the robot body-length (100cm).