ABSTRACT
The hybrid infrastructure complements existing autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) autonomy middleware and behavior architecture, such as Mission Oriented Operating Suite-Interval Programming, and trilevel hybrid control architecture of mission planning and executive, as an efficient and reliable communication infrastructure among AUVs. The proposed hybrid infrastructure consists of two complementary components: hybrid radio frequency (RF)-acoustic networking of autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) and AUVs and swarming-based ASV navigation. The mobility of AUV fleets introduces additional challenges. AUVs often experience high uncertainties in localization and time synchronization due to the lack of global positioning system signals underwater. AUVs may be sparsely deployed over a large aquatic region, so that network connectivity becomes intermittent. The network topology of a fleet of AUVs is in constant change, leading to variable and long propagation delay. Mobility also creates variation on data rates in different geographical locations of the network, as the achievable data rate decreases with the increase of communication range.
