The kick-off meeting of the subCULTron project, which is a part of the H2020-FET-PROACTIVE initiative, was held on 26th and 27th of May in Pontedera, Italy. Project partners from Italy, Austria, Belgium, Croatia, Germany, and France gathered to share knowledge and ideas, and decide on the next actions. The project aims for achieving long-term autonomy in a learning, self-regulating, self-sustaining underwater society/culture of robots in a high-impact application area of Venice Lagoon, Italy.
Partners aim to build a heterogeneous system that consists of 3 different agent types:
- artificial mussels (on the sea-ground) with minimal movement capabilities, which act as the collective long-term memory of the system and monitor the natural habitat, including biological agents like algae, bacterial incrustation and fish
- artificial lily pads (on the water surface), which interface with the human society, delivering energy and information influx from ship traffic or satellite data
- artificial fish (Between the two layers), which move/monitor/explore the environment and exchange info with the mussels and lily pads.
The project aims to push forward the edge of knowledge with novel sensors (electric sense/electro-communication), novel bio-inspired algorithms (underwater hives) and novel energy harvesting in underwater scenarios.