Submarine cultures perform long-term robotic exploration of unconventional environmental niches
subCULTron aims for achieving long-term autonomy in a learning, self-regulating, self-sustaining underwater
society/culture of robots in a high-impact application area: Venice, Italy. Our heterogeneous system consists
of 3 different agent types: On the sea-ground, artificial mussels are the collective long-term memory of the
system, allowing information to stay beyond the runtime of other agents, thus allowing to continue learning from
previously learned states. These mussels monitor the natural habitat, including biological agents like algae, bacterial
incrustation and fish. On the water surface, artificial lilypads interface with the human society, delivering energy
and information influx from ship traffic or satellite data. Between those two layers, artificial fish
move/monitor/explore the environment and exchange info with the mussels and lilypads. Artificial mussels are a
novel class of underwater agents. We aim to push forward the edge of knowledge with novel sensors (electric
sense/electro-communication), novel bio-inspired algorithms (underwater hives) and novel energy harvesting in
underwater scenarios. We will improve the world’s record for swarm-size in autonomous collective underwater
robotics by almost one order of magnitude. Our application field is a human- and animal-co-inhabited real-world
environment of high impact: Venice canals & lagoon. These habitats are highly dynamic and structured, expected
to be reflected by a spatial self-structuring of our mussel population. These sub-populations locally perform memetic/
cultural learning algorithms on their specific local data. Thus our cultural evolution algorithms will promote
sub-culture development, similar to the human society that does the same above the water level in parallel. Overall,
we aim for an artificial society underneath the water-surface to the service of a human society above the water.