Trustable Environmental Monitoring by Means of Sensors Networks on Swarming Autonomous Marine Vessels and Distributed Ledger Technology

Abstract

The article describes a highly trustable environmental monitoring system employing a small scalable swarm of small-sized marine vessels equipped with compact sensors and intended for the monitoring of water resources and infrastructures. The technological foundation of the process which guarantees that any third party can not alter the samples taken by the robot swarm is based on the Robonomics platform. This platform provides encrypted decentralized technologies based on distributed ledger tools, and market mechanisms for organizing the work of heterogeneous multi-vendor cyber-physical systems when automated economical transactions are needed. A small swarm of robots follows the autonomous ship, which is in charge of maintaining the secure transactions. The swarm implements a version of Reynolds' Boids model based on the Belief Space Planning approach. The main contributions of our work consist of: (1) the deployment of a secure sample certification and logging platform based on the blockchain with a small-sized swarm of autonomous vessels performing maneuvers to measure chemical parameters of water in automatic mode; (2) the coordination of a leader-follower framework for the small platoon of robots by means of a Reynolds' Boids model based on a Belief Space Planning approach. In addition, the article describes the process of measuring the chemical parameters of water by using sensors located on the vessels. Both technology testing on experimental vessel and environmental measurements are detailed. The results have been obtained through real world experiments of an autonomous vessel, which was integrated as the “leader” into a mixed reality simulation of a swarm of simulated smaller vessels.The design of the experimental vessel physically deployed in the Volga river to demonstrate the practical viability of the proposed methods is shortly described.

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Artificial intelligence and IoT driven technologies for environmental pollution monitoring and management

“…The pollution has destroyed aquatic ecosystems and resulted in health and safety issues for humanity (Zhai et al, 2021;Yusuf et al, 2023). Protecting water resources and preventing the release of different pollutants represent the first steps in ensuring safety for the environment and people (Berman et al, 2020). Various approaches for monitoring the physico-chemical parameters of water resources have led to the implementation of novel smart technologies (Geetha and Gouthami, 2016;Huang et al, 2018).…”

Autonomous inland navigation: a literature review and extracontractual liability issues

“…Autonomous vessels are not only developed and deployed as a means of transport for goods. They are used for environmental and water monitoring (Moulton et al 2018;Berman et al 2020;Chensky et al 2021), to collect marine meteorological measurements (Chen et al 2019a), to monitor and collect data from wetlands (Odetti et al 2018), to make hydrological measurements (Da , to map the underwater bed and collect bathymetric data from inland and coastal environment (Sanfilippo et al 2021;Dohner et al 2022;Marchel et al 2020;Mohd Adam et al 2021) and to perform hydrographic surveys (Stateczny et al 2018).…”