Envirobot: A bio-inspired environmental monitoring platform

Autonomous marine vehicles are becoming essential tools in aquatic environmental monitoring systems, and can be used for instance for data acquisition, remote sensing, and mapping of the spatial extent of pollutant spills. In this work, we present an unconventional bio-inspired autonomous robot aimed for execution of such tasks. The Envirobot platform is based on our existing segmented anguilliform swimming robots, but with important adaptations in terms of energy use and efficiency, control, navigation, and communication possibilities. To this end, Envirobot has been designed to have more endurance, flexible computational power, long range communication link, and versatile flexible environmental sensor integration. Its low level control is powered by an ARM processor in the head unit and micro processors in each active module. On top of this, integration of a computer-on-module enables versatile high level control methods. We present some preliminary results and experiments done with Envirobot to test the added navigation and control strategies.