Towards Fault-Tolerant and Energy-Efficient Swarms of Underwater Robots

The increasing urgency to study the world´s native water bodies regarding environmental monitoring leads to a worldwide growing interest in the development of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs). The robots are equipped with several sensors, e.g. cameras, environmental tracking systems and acoustic modules which provide an inexpensive alternative to manual investigations. To increase mission time and decrease sensitivity against faults, a swarm of such underwater robots can afford many benefits. Hence this paper presents the development of the miniature AUV MONSUN II, which acts in a networked swarm to reach an energy-efficient behaviour with simultaneous consideration of fault-tolerance. Therefore, the robots use their communication network to propagate internal states and build underwater formations according to current mission tasks.