Underwater acoustic source localization using a multi-robot system: the DAMPS project

This paper presents the funded project DAMPS, that addresses the development of a multi-robot system for the position tracking of noise sources in underwater environment. The robots composing the team collaborate in order to fuse the local information coming from the analysis of a Passive Acoustic Monitoring sensor, with the final aim of estimating the position of a the acoustic source. The team is thus a distributed, modular and reconfigurable sonar system that can be controlled remotely from a Control&Command center. In this paper we highlight the functional architecture that will be implemented within the project, the possible algorithmic approaches to be employed within the submodules and possible application scenarios.