Large Exploration by Small Payloads: Underwater Deployables via Robot Swarms

Pascal Spino, Marc Bäckert, Lianhao Yin, Daniela Rus

Keywords: underwater robots, swarms, modular robots, deployables

TL;DR: Small underwater robots connect to form larger underwater robots

Abstract: Ocean worlds such as Europa present a fundamental mismatch between payload constraints and exploration scale: ocean access methods severely limit delivered volume, while the environments to be explored span vast, 100-kilometer-scale regions. This work proposes an underwater deployable architecture in which a compact payload of centimeter-scale robots combine to build a larger aggregate system through self-assembly. We present a swarm of small autonomous underwater vehicles capable of reversible magnetic docking and coordinated propulsion, enabling dynamic reconfiguration between dispersed and aggregated states. Experiments demonstrate that chain aggregates achieve substantial performance gains over individual robots, including approximately twofold increases in swimming speed and nearly an order of magnitude improvement in cost of transport. These results show that physically connected swarms can trade between efficient long-range traversal and distributed sensing, providing a mechanism for large-area exploration with inherently small, modular payloads. This approach extends the concept of spacecraft deployables from static structures to reconfigurable robotic systems.

Submission Number: 35