Underwater Robots Equipped with Artificial Electric Sense for the Exploration of Unconventional Aquatic Niches

This article presents different use of the electric sense perception in the context of underwater robot navigation. To illustrate the developed navigation behaviours we will introduce a recently launched european project named subCULTron and will show some simulation and experimentation results. The project subCULTron aims at achieving long-term collective robot exploration and monitoring of underwater environments. The demonstration will take place in the lagoon of Venice, a large shallow embayment composed of salt turbid water that represents a challenging environment for underwater robots as common sensors like vision or acoustic are difficult to handle. To overcome turbidity and confinement problems our robots will be equipped with artificial electric sensors that will be used as the main sensorial modality for navigation. Electric sense is a bio-inspired sense that has been developed by several species of fish living in turbid and confined underwater environment. In this paper, many different robotic behaviours based on the electric field perception will be presented, in particular we will address reactive navigation, object/robots detection, and object localization and estimation.