Underwater Robot Swarms: Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

Underwater sensing will potentially change its form substantiallyover the coming decades as widely scattered sensing devicesbecome more and more practically feasible. Those many-pointsensing systems could provide a temporally consistent view intothe depths of our oceans for the first time. Maritime sciencesas well as ocean engineering applications will gradually changetheir character from the still dominant expensive, large, single-unit systems to inexpensive, small, multidevice systems. There isan apparent parallelism to the transition from central mainframecomputers to billions of scattered, tiny microcontrollers, whereminiaturization and production efficiency substantially changedthe character of the general computer industry over the last fourdecades.