FLEXUS aims at extending RAWFIE experimental infrastructure by providing a set of innovative high manoeuvrable, small-sized, one-man-portable Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), which will support coordinated networked operations and novel above water communications technologies. This USVs swarm will extend and enrich the type of test scenarios for water-based IoT platforms, where M2M (Machine-to-Machine) and Internet of Moving Things applications may use long-range single-hop communications and multi-hop radio networks. The work in this sub-project is carried out by a research team with solid know-how and extensive research work on unmanned vehicles and communications, including simulation, prototyping, development of unmanned vehicles, and experimental testing skills, gained in past and ongoing projects, including FP7 CONFINE (FIRE project), ICARUS, and SUNNY, and H2020 VAMOS and STRONGMAR.

The FLEXUS project is funded by the project RAWFIE (Road-, Air-, Water-based Future Internet Experimentation), which aims to create a federation of different network testbeds that will work together to make their resources available under a common framework.