MORPH (Marine Robotic System of Self-Organising, Logically Linked Physical Nodes) is a four-year project funded by the European Commission that started in 2012.
Groups of autonomous underwater vehicles are required to operate in areas where the visibility is low, obstacles are not known in advance, and a single vehicle would have very limited capabilities. The techniques enabling cooperative behaviour of the MORPH ensemble will pave the way for the development of advanced multi-vehicle systems capable of executing data acquisition and habitat mapping tasks in complex 3D environments (such as canyons and rugged cliff areas) in the presence of reduced visibility and natural unforeseen obstacles.
The institutions participating in the trails are: Atlas Elektronik (Germany), Ifremer (France), Jacobs University Bremen (Germany), IUT – Ilmenau University of Technology (Germany), Computer Vision and Robotics research Institute at the University of Girona (Spain), IMAR – Institute of Marine Research (Portugal), CMRE – NATO STO Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (Italy), IST – Instituto Superior Tecnico (Portugal), and CNR – Istituto di Studio Sui Sistemi Intelligenti per l’Automazione (Italy).
Learn more at the official website: http://morph-project.eu/
Checkout also the Toulon 2013 trials: https://sites.google.com/site/morphtoulon2013/