Compressed Underwater Acoustic Communications for Dynamic Interaction with Underwater Vehicles

Underwater vehicles are utilized in various applications including underwater data-collection missions. The tethered connection constrains the mission both in distance traveled and number of vehicles that can run in the same area, while the addition of acoustic communications onto the vehicles grants them several functionalities. However, due to the low bandwidth of the underwater acoustic channel-which leads to low data rates-and the time overhead imposed by both the channel propagation delay and the processing delay by the acoustic modems, efficient protocols are required. In this paper, an implicit data-compression and transmission protocol is proposed to carry out environmental monitoring missions such as adaptive sampling of physical and chemical parameters in the water. In a semi-autonomous manner between the vehicle and the control center, both sides keep silent in data transmission as long as they can estimate and predict the actions of the other side, unless environmental data and/or kinematic data are found to be unpredictable. Our design puts the human in the loop to send high-level control commands. Experiments were conducted using an autonomous vehicle with WHOI micro-modems in the Raritan River, Somerset, Carnegie Lake in Princeton, and in the Marine Park in Red Bank, all in New Jersey.