Bio-inspired communications for coordination among autonomous underwater vehicles

To take measurements in space and time from the undersampled vast ocean, it is necessary to employ multiple autonomous underwater vehicles, such as gliders, that communicate and coordinate with each other. These vehicles need to form a team in a specific formation, steer through the 3D region of interest, and take application-dependent measurements such as temperature and salinity. In this paper, bio-inspired underwater acoustic communication and coordination algorithms are proposed to enable glider swarming that is robust against acoustic channel impairments. Performance of the proposed algorithms is evaluated when i) number of vehicles, ii) team formation geometry, and iii) team target trajectory are provided.