Networking Autonomous Underwater Vehicles to Automize Cooperative Missions

Research regarding AUVs has increased over the past decades. The interest is driven by the possibility to automatize underwater missions, requiring human interaction only at the base station for supervision. This avoids putting humans at risk, e.g., for mine countermeasures. Since AUVs are also relatively inexpensive and their mostly customizable equipment offers a range of applications, they are attractive from an economic perspective as well. This paper aims to provide an introduction to the networking of autonomous underwater vehicles to enable cooperative missions such as cooperative hunting. To give an overview, navigation methods and underwater acoustic communication, which is challenging due to multiple factors, are explained. Building upon this, different manifestations of underwater acoustic network architectures with autonomous underwater vehicles as mobile nodes are presented. We show numerous applications in which networked AUV swarms provide a significant benefit.