Paying a way of the ROV equipped with a function of underwater laser communication

The combination of ROV and the seafloor-based sensors networks has become a mainstream medium to explore the world under water. As the task becomes more diversified, the data volume of the communication between the ROV and the sensor node grows increasingly. Although the light can not perform the long-distance propagation as the acoustic signal under water, with the high bandwidth speciality of optical communication, it is absolutely feasible to acquire a highspeed information interaction in short range. To achieve this goal, this paper aims to pay a way of an ROV equipped with a function of underwater laser communication system. In this paper, following the principle of ”bottom to top, analog to digital, low speed to high speed”, our novel ROV design with a laser communication system and its configuration was presented, and a simple analog communication link was built to test the feasibility, then the digital communication protocol RS-232 was applied to this link. Experiment results showed that in short rang, a highspeed and low-BER laser communication link under water was feasible.