subCULTron:
Submarine cultures perform long- term robotic exploration of unconventional environmental niches
Project description
information from the official web site subCULTron
The aim of subCULTron project is achieving long-term autonomy in a learning, self-regulating, self-sustaining underwater society/culture of robots in a high-impact application area: Venice, Italy. On the sea-ground, artificial mussels are the collective long-term memory of the system, allowing information to stay beyond the runtime of other agents, thus allowing to continue learning from previously learned states. These mussels monitor the natural habitat, including biological agents like algae, bacterial incrustation and fish. On the water surface, artificial lily pads interface with the human society, delivering energy and information influx from ship traffic or satellite data.
The application field is a human- and animal-co-inhabited real-world environment of high impact: Venice canals & lagoon. These habitats are highly dynamic and structured, expected to be reflected by a spatial self-structuring of our mussel population. These sub-populations locally perform memetic or cultural learning algorithms on their specific local data. Thus cultural evolution algorithms will promote sub-culture development, similar to the human society that does the same above the water level in parallel.
Overall, we aim for an artificial society underneath the water-surface to the service of a human society above the water.
The project is funded by European Commission under the programme Future and Emerging Technologies,
EU-H2020 Project no. 640967, FETPROACT-2-2014: Knowing, doing, being: cognition beyond problem solving
