Doing more with less – effective use of limited acoustic bandwidth
Communication and navigation on and above the surface of the ocean is mostly accomplished using electromagnetic waves. Once below the surface, electromagnetic waves do not get us very far, and often we have to either be disconnected and fully autonomous, use tethered systems to aid high-speed communication, or rely on acoustics for sensing, communication and navigation. Critical undersea operations require human-in-the-loop, and the cost and complexity of tethering sensors and robots can often be prohibitive. While sound propagates well underwater, acoustic systems are severely constrained by limited available acoustic bandwidth. While acoustic systems have become more performance and reliable as compared to what they used to be, physics sets a limit on how much data can be pushed through the acoustic channel.
In this talk, I discuss practical strategies to make the most of the available bandwidth. These span a wide range of techniques from effective coordination for access to the acoustic medium across multiple systems to state-of-art physics-guided machine learning techniques that can leverage priors for maximizing data rates and minimizing the amount of data that needs to be transferred to achieve missions. While tetherless underwater systems traditionally log sensor data locally for offline processing, I wish to show you that it is often possible to communicate key information (including sensor data, images, videos, etc) in real-time over an underwater acoustic wireless link if one uses the available bandwidth smartly.