SWARMs Project

The SWARMs project spearheads the strategic expansion of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs), remotely operated vehicles (ROVs), and unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) within the maritime and offshore sectors. By fostering their integration throughout the mission lifecycle, from conception and planning to execution, and utilizing secure underwater sonar communications protocols, SWARMs seeks to achieve significant cost reduction, enhance personnel safety, and stimulate growth within the offshore industry.

SWARMs project aims to make AUVs, ROVs and USVs further accessible and useful, making autonomous maritime and offshore operations a viable option for new and existent industries:

• Enabling AUVs/ROVs to work in a cooperative mesh thus opening up new applications and ensuring re-usability by promoting heterogeneous standard vehicles that can combine their capabilities, in detriment of further costly specialised vehicles.

• Increasing the autonomy of AUVs/USVs and improving the usability of ROVs for the execution of simple and complex tasks, contributing to mission operations’ sophistication.

Underwater Image Processing Toolbox (UNDROIP)

UNDROIP is an open-source software that can be used to process underwater side-scan sonar images. UNDROIP provides different functionalities to sidescan sonar images, such as image normalization, sea-bottom detection or bottom first returns, landmark detection, registration, speed correction, removal of water column and bathymetric matching. UNDROIP has been developed in SWARMs project within the scope of its Work Package 4 (Environment Recognition and Sensing)

Sonar imaging is currently the exemplary choice used in underwater imaging. However, since sound signals are absorbed by water and due to sound interferene and some other related problems, underwater maps obtained from sonar images will be difficult to process. UNDROIP's objective is to share fuctions of different methods that can be used, for example, to normalize the images against to echo deay, and to perform speed correction, registration, landmark detection, etc. The hope is that these functions are pruned further to better performance, and additional fuctions to be added in the future by the people interested in such software. UNDROIP has been carried out within the SWARMs project (www.swarms.eu).

License UNDRIOP is open-sourced under the GNU General Public License v3.0. See the LICENSE file for details.