SWARMs

The primary goal of the SWARMs project is to expand the use of underwater and surface vehicles (AUVs, ROVs, USVs) to facilitate the conception, planning and execution of maritime and offshore operations and missions. This will reduce the operational costs, increase the safety of tasks and of involved individuals, and expand the offshore sector.

SWARMs project aims to make AUVs, ROVs and USVs further accessible and useful, making autonomous maritime and offshore operations a viable option for new and existent industries:

• Enabling AUVs/ROVs to work in a cooperative mesh thus opening up new applications and ensuring re-usability by promoting heterogeneous standard vehicles that can combine their capabilities, in detriment of further costly specialised vehicles.
• Increasing the autonomy of AUVs/USVs and improving the usability of ROVs for the execution of simple and complex tasks, contributing to mission operations’ sophistication.

The general approach is to design and develop an integrated platform for a new generation of autonomous maritime and underwater operations, as a set of software/hardware components, adopted and incorporated into the current generation of maritime and underwater vehicles in order to improve autonomy, robustness, cost-effectiveness, and reliability of offshore operations, namely through vehicles cooperation.

SWARMs’ achievements will be demonstrated in three field testing sites and occasions, taking into account different scenarios and use cases:

• Corrosion prevention in offshore installations
• Monitoring of chemical pollution
• Detection, inspection and tracking of plumes
• Berm building
• Seabed Mapping

SWARMs is an industry-led project, where large technology companies collaborate with SMEs specialized in the subsea, robotics and communication sectors, and universities together with research institutions ensure that the state-of-the-art innovations in these domains will rapidly make their way into market. This process counts with the perspectives and expectations of two industrial end-users, which are also part of the consortium.

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