Focused exploration for cooperative robotic watercraft

Environmental monitoring is one of the main societal challenge of the last century. In this work, we focus on a water monitoring system, based on Cooperative Robotic Watercrafts (CRW). A crucial aspect for the CRW is the high level of autonomy of the platforms, which can be controlled by few human operators that provide high level instructions to the system. The contribution of this paper is to propose a new method for cooperative exploration, providing an approach to collect relevant information while minimizing costs. Results show that the proposed approach provides a promising method for monitoring water bodies when there is a-priori information on interesting range of values for the data to be acquired.