Essex scientists develop more easy, effective and efficient way to monitoring water pollution, especially sea water in ports. The team will develop autonomous fish equipped with chemical sensors, which will find pollutants and create a real-time 3D map of the port, showing what chemicals are present and where.
This robofish project called as SHOAL project. SHOAL will use advanced swarm intelligence techniques to control and coordinate a school of robotic fish efficiently and adapt quickly to changes in the port environment. This will benefit not only monitoring operations in ports across the EU, but also lead to important advances in robotics, chemical analysis, underwater communications and robot intelligence.
The technology developed through this joint project (University of Essex, 6 partners from 5 European countries and has been backed by the EU 7th Framework Programme Theme 3-ICT) will not only enable port authority to gain increased mobility and flexibility to monitor ship-source pollution, but also enable them to monitor other types of harmful contaminants and other pollutants from underwater pipelines. This is a very challenging project. One of the key challenges is to make the robotic fish fully autonomous, easy to use and able to meet the needs of the port. The issues such as data security, communication, and energy will also be interesting challenges.
So, we hope that this project done successfully. Not only made the robotics fish run, but also can identify pollutant and clean up them for better world.