Communication for Underwater Robots: Recent Trends

Purpose of Review Underwater robot communication – both between underwater robots and between other nodes and stations out of the water – is essential for intelligent cooperative behaviors and for enabling high-impact applications such as ocean monitoring and exploration, surveillance, and pollution cleaning. This paper surveys recent literature on underwater communication with a specific focus on underwater robots and their autonomy with the objective of identifying recent research trends, open challenges, and future directions. Recent Findings From out-of-the-water communication, underwater communication presents unique challenges, including low bandwidth of the communication channel and the lack of reliable communication infrastructure. Current research has looked at reducing the cost of the devices, designing more realistic communication models, and including those models in robot planning. Summary While current efforts have made progress on underwater communication systems for supporting robotics autonomy, reliable communication for long-term operations remains an open problem. Exciting research directions, including but not limited to simpler communication configuration, selective information sharing, and graceful recovery, emerge from this survey, which can contribute towards heterogeneous robotic systems that can be deployed for the exploration of the underwater world.