Sensors and control of robotics swarms for the elimination of marine oil pollution

This paper presents the concept as well as first results of the EU-MOP ("Elimination Units for Marine Oil Pollutions") project (1). The basic idea of this project is a swarm out of autonomous marine robots which are able to recover oil with the help of oil skimmers. In order to achieve a flexible and robust system, the swarm intelligence approach has been used as control paradigm for the EU-MOP robots. A robotic swarm is a homogeneous group of identical robots without any hierarchies, whose individuals interact directly or indirectly with each other and with the environment. For this interaction sensors play a major role, thus the use of sensors for robotics swarms will be examined with the help of a simulation. Furthermore a method for the evaluation of swarms in comparison to single robot systems will be presented. (1) EU-MOP is a research project co-funded by the European Commission in the context of the 6th Framework Programme. The project started in February of 2005 and has a duration of 3 years. The EU-MOP consortium is coordinated by the National University of Athens (Greece), and also includes as partners the University of Glasgow and Strathclyde (UK), Sirehna S.A. (France), I (Portugal), BMT Ltd (UK), Cetemar S.L. (Spain), Environmental Protection Engineering S.A. (Greece), Aurensis S.L. (Spain), the University of Oxford (UK), Consultrans S.A. (Spain), the Institute of Shipping Economics and Logistics (Germany) and the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering and Automation IPA (Germany)