Swarm-Based Unmanned Underwater Vehicles to Oversee Dams and Its Surrounding Ecosystem

Structures that restricts the flow of water can be called a dam. Dams have proven to be of great use to the human civilization, they stand a testament to us overcoming the great natural forces. Dams have been built by humans for a plethora of reasons from storing water for agricultural purposes but more lately towards the generation of energy. Globally hydroelectricity accounts to about is a significant contributor to electricity generated and in India its contribution is of considerable amount and growing. These dams are an indispensable part of our countries functioning and loss of even a single one would have drastic effects. These dams given the way they are built are expected to take a lot of water pressure and while they do it effectively, over time due to other reasons like deformation, silting, excessive seepage, rockslides and so on they get damaged and may hinder their performance and even bring down its life expectancy. In this report, we have described the use of Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUV) for short to monitor and control these aspects that would otherwise pose a threat to the structure.