Under water, there are many problems that do not occur above the water. For example, communication under water is very limited. This means that an underwater robot that does not have a direct connection to a human operator above the water via a so-called tether can only communicate in a very limited way or not at all. Therefore, if the environment changes or a problem like a thruster failure occurs, the robot has to be able to adapt itself. We call this a self-adaptive system. However, how can we be sure that it does this “in a correct way”? How can we for example be sure that the robot returns to a point where it can be picked up before its battery is depleted?
In this Master’s thesis topic you can learn about
- self-adaptive underwater robots
- methods for modelling a self-adaptive system to enable an analysis later
- methods for analysing a self-adaptive system to ensure that “it operates as it is supposed to”.