"Robots are often deployed in areas that are inaccessible or dangerous to humans, areas where human intervention might not even be possible," said Florian Berlinger, a Ph.D. Candidate at SEAS and Wyss and first author of the paper. "In these situations, it really benefits you to have a highly autonomous robot swarm that is self-sufficient. By using implicit rules and 3-D visual perception, we were able to create a system that has a high degree of autonomy and flexibility underwater where things like GPS and WiFi are not accessible."