Communication infrastructure for fleets of autonomous marine vehicles: concepts and first results

Cooperative robotics have been one of the hot topics of research for different scientific and technological fields throughout the last decade. Extending the concepts explored in land and aerial robotics to the underwater application scenarios have proven to be particularly difficult due to the limitations of the available communication channels, lack of standardization, etc. The GREX project aims at providing the means to use different autonomous marine vehicles, from different manufacturers in cooperative missions. This paper describes the ongoing work related to the development of the communication system that supports all data exchange required for team operation and gives account of the first sea trials experience involving a fleet of two AUVs performing a simple coordination task relying on inter-vehicle acoustic communication.