Multiple communicating autonomous underwater vehicles

This paper addresses the problems associated with missions using multiple cooperating autonomous underwater vehicles. In such missions, inter-vehicle communication is an important requirement upon which coordination strategy and intelligence decision making functions can be built. This paper presents briefly our current modeling and simulation work on characterizing the vehicle communication performance, together with some of the preliminary results. Even with much simplification of scenario modeling, simulation results exhibit intricate communication characteristics, and they can vary significantly as a function of mission requirements and scenarios.