Page 78 - Frontier Technologies to Protect the Environment and Tackle Climate Change

Frontier Technologies to Protect the Environment and Tackle Climate Change

While oceans are global and not limited to a particular city or urban area, certain cities are supporting
the use of emerging robotics to monitor marine pollution and measure its impacts on marine bio-life.
Venice, Italy, was the launch site of such a pilot project a few years ago, as detailed in Box 17.

Box 17: ENEA’s use of robotic fish in Venice, Italy
230, 231

In 2015, an Italian team from ENEA, the Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy
and Sustainable Economic Development, and Rome's University of Tor Vergata, presented, a
new system of robotic fish that could be used to monitor a host of different marine factors
and protect Venice from high tides. This system of ‘bio-inspired’ robots was called the
‘Venus Swarm’.

The Venus Swarm was composed of several cooperative and coordinated robotic vehicles.
The line of research that resulted in the technology focused particularly on imitating
aggregation patterns in animals and their group intelligence. ‘Venus Swarm is a swarm of
robots that, in very close contact, act like network nodes and make up a submarine wireless
system that uses sound and light to communicate. In clean waters, the optical system makes
it possible to transmit a large quantity of information, whereas the sound system, redesigned
specifically for this system, can be mainly used in dirty waters,’ according to ENEA at the time.

While piloted initially to be used in the surveillance of MOSE, the bulkhead system that is in
place to defend the Venetian Lagoon from the high tide, the Venus Swarm technology has
great potential for application in environmental exploration and monitoring large marine
areas underwater. These robotic fish could be used to map the seabed for sensitive data
on acidification, salinity, temperature, speed and direction of marine currents, as well as on
flooding and coastal erosion. The robots, which could be employed in swarms of dozens,
may be used, for example, to monitor oil platforms, pipelines and ports, and also to manage
migratory flows and protect marine biodiversity. The use of these robot swarms in the
control and inspection of the seabed of coastal areas and ocean waters could offer greater
advantages overall, compared to the use of single and sophisticated, but very expensive,
robotic systems. Figure 29 shows the Venus Swarm in action.

Figure 29: The Venus Swarm [xxix]

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