An optimized UUV communications framework for multi-vehicle arbitration

The reliance of unmanned underwater vehicles (UUVs) on low-bandwidth acoustic communications has been a significant limiting factor on the development of autonomy for multi-vehicle systems. Latency inherent to hardware limitations and low throughput together have inhibited many of the traditional approaches to robotic cooperation, which simply require too much data to be passed for these methods to be feasible in the underwater regime. By implementing a novel approach to information sharing and intelligent updating schemes, researchers at the Naval Surface Warfare Center Panama City have been able to significantly alleviate these problems and enable collaborative operations with exchange of complete high-level mission data.