AUV team cooperation: emerging behaviours and networking modalities

The advances in the technology of acoustic modems and the possibility of high-rate, reliable communications, have opened up new ways of communication between various remote instruments within a network environment. The development of such networks, in turn, enlarges the use of team of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) to engage in cooperative missions towards common goals. This contribution analyses the variation in performance of an adaptive cooperative algorithm for AUVs with respect to two different communication modalities. The first case is based on the use of an underwater acoustic network which is able to route the information towards the desired recipients; the second case uses a simpler scheme where each agent uses its onboard acoustic modem for broadcast transmission (i.e. all the agents that are able to directly listen the messages receive the information). The simulation testbed is based on the underwater acoustic network library AUVNetSim, which we adapted to simulate cooperative autonomous agents and broadcast transmission at physical layer.