ISE Magazine, September 2017
ISE ICT SOLUTIONS EDUCATION 34 A Network of Marine Robots We are working to support effective underwater communication networks to allow undersea robots to work together and report back home We are working to help robots behave intelligently and act as a team For example one of the robots could find some interesting feature and call the rest of the team With effective undersea communication this can all happen in an autonomous way without requiring direct human intervention If needed the operation can be managed by land based engineers who monitor all the communications from a command and control room ashore The connection to land is made through gateway buoys on the surface of the water equipped with radio links to local support platforms or satellites This is particularly important for search and rescue operations Autonomous vehicles are relatively inexpensive and of course unmanned so they can be sent to do dirty dangerous jobs And because sound is known to have an impact on marine life we work with biologists and other scientists to protect the marine environment Much of this development work is carried out on the Littoral Ocean Observatory Network or LOON See sidebar Whats a LOON for more information The LOON is a test facility installed in the harbor of La INTERNATIONAL UPDATE Behavior and capabilities of teams of intelligent robots depend on their capacity to communicate with each other using acoustic signals and to dynamically adapt their missions without human intervention However underwater communication is challenging and until now there was no unique way to do it Here a network of underwater robots during a test of the European Commission FP7 MORPH project on which CMRE collaborated The CMRE has developed JANUS the first digital standard for underwater acoustic communications promulgated as a NATO Standard since March 2017 JANUS works like a baseline common denominator which consists of a robust signaling acoustic method and allows underwater assets to understand each other
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