Wireless Image Compression and Transmission for Underwater Robotic Applications?

Nowadays, there is an increasing demand for underwater robotic intervention systems around the world in several application domains. Examples of applications include search and recovery (i.e. aviation or naval accidents), archaeology, offshore industry, environment protection and monitoring, etc. The commercially available systems are expensive and far from what it is demanded in many aspects, justifying the need of more autonomous, cheap and easy-to- use solutions for underwater intervention missions. Most of them consist of remote operated vehicles, relying on an umbilical cable for its remote operation. This umbilical provides high bandwidth and reliable communications between the vehicle and the operator, but also presents some drawbacks: high cost, movement and depth constraints, lack of autonomy, etc. The current trend is to advance towards less expensive and more autonomous systems, where the umbilical is not present, and the transmission of wireless information is necessary. This work analyses the use of an underwater RF link to provide affordable communications. Moreover, different data compression techniques that can be used to optimize underwater wireless communications are analysed. Image transmission performance results in pool conditions are presented and discussed.