It is where we all came from and it is vital to our future, but the earth’s oceans, seas and waterways remain a mystery to us – a final frontier. The Sunrise project is at the forefront of a revolution in communications, creating an underwater ‘internet of things’, that will mobilise robots to work in groups, interacting together and passing back information to us on life underwater.

The internet is omnipresent and has become a part of how we live, but now this connectivity is being extended from where we all take it for granted to where it has never been before – underwater.
 
Thanks to the SUNRISE project, supported by the European Commission under the 7th Framework Programme , underwater robots will be able to work autonomously, having received instructions. For the first time they will be able to communicate to each other and send data back to computers through the Internet, regardless of swiftly changing circumstances and challenges to data transmission.
 
‘The gaps in our knowledge of the underwater world are extensive. We know so little despite the fact that marine ecosystems are central to the health of our planet and vital to our economies,’ project leader Dr Chiara Petrioli says. Identifying threats to oil and gas pipelines, monitoring the environment, protecting archeological sites and finding out more about the geology of our planet – the ways teams of aquatic robots could help us learn more is endless, ‘This list is as extensive as your imagination,’ says Dr Petrioli.

as published in CORDIS - Community Research and Development Information Service

Please follow the link to read the complete article: http://cordis.europa.eu/result/rcn/148257_en.html