Sensor concept for robotic swarms for the elimination of marine oil pollutions

This paper presents the concept as well as first results of the EU-MOP ("Elimination Units for Marine Oil Pollutions") project. The basic idea of this project is a swarm out of autonomous marine robots which are able to recover oil with the help of oil skimmers. In order to achieve a flexible and robust system, the swarm intelligence approach has been used as control paradigm for the EU-MOP robots. A robotic swarm is a homogeneous group of identical robots without any hierarchies, whose individuals interact directly or indirectly with each other and with the environment. For this interaction sensors play a major role, thus the use of sensors for robotic swarms will be examined with the help of a simulation. Furthermore a method for the evaluation of swarms in comparison to single robot systems will be presented.