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autoNomous, self-Learning, OPTImal and compLete Underwater Systems

Project description


Cognitive Systems and Robotics

Current multi-AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) systems are far from being capable of fully autonomously taking over real-life complex situation-awareness operations. As such operations require advanced reasoning and decision-making abilities the existing designs have to heavily rely on human operators. But humans can easily be overwhelmed by the information overload, fatigue can act negatively to their performance, properly coordinating vehicles actions is hard and continuous operation is all but impossible. NOPTILUS takes the view that an effective fully-autonomous multi-AUV system is capable of overcoming these shortcomings and replacing human-operated operations. To successfully attain such an objective, significant advances are required in the fields of cooperative/cognitive-based communications, sonars, perceptual sensory-motor, learning motion control and learning/cognitive-based situation understanding.

Current multi-AUV systems are far from being capable of fully autonomously taking over real-life complex situation-awareness operations. As such operations require advanced reasoning and decision-making abilities the current designs have to heavily rely on human operators. The involvement of humans, however, is by no means a guarantee of performance; humans can easily be overwhelmed by the information overload, fatigue can act detrimentally to their performance, properly coordinating vehicles actions is hard, and continuous operation is all but impossible. Within NOPTILUS we take the view that an effective fully-autonomous multi-AUV concept/system, is capable of overcoming these shortcomings, by replacing human-operated operations by a fully autonomous one. To successfully attain such an objective, significant advances are required, involving cooperative & cognitive-based communications and sonars (low level), Gaussian Process-based estimation as well as perceptual sensory-motor and learning motion control (medium level), and learning/cognitive-based situation understanding and motion strategies (high level).Of paramount importance is the integration of all these advances and the demonstration of the NOPTILUS system in a realistic environment at the Port of Leixões, utilizing a team of 6 AUVs that will be operating continuously on a 24hours/7days-a-week basis. As part of this demonstration another important aspect of the NOPTILUS system that of (near-) optimality will be shown. Evaluation of the performance of the overall NOPTILUS system will be performed with emphasis on its robustness, dependability, adaptability and flexibility especially when it deals with completely unknown underwater environments and situations never taught before as well as its ability to provide with arbitrarily-close-to-the-optimal performance.

Programme(s)

Topic(s)

Call for proposal

FP7-ICT-2009-6
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Funding Scheme

CP - Collaborative project (generic)

Coordinator

ETHNIKO KENTRO EREVNAS KAI TECHNOLOGIKIS ANAPTYXIS
Address
Charilaou thermi road 6 km
57001 Thermi thessaloniki
Greece

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Region
Βόρεια Ελλάδα Κεντρική Μακεδονία Θεσσαλονίκη
Administrative Contact
George Giannopoulos (Prof.)
Links
EU contribution
€ 727 178,00

Participants (9)

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Last update: 22 April 2017

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Permalink: https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/270180

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