Wireless HROV control with compressed visual feedback over an acoustic link

This paper presents the current state of the development of a Wireless HROV (Hybrid Remotely Operated Vehicle HROV), providing feedback of both, camera and telemetry data to the operator, over an acoustic communication link. This experiment is part of the MERBOTS Spanish national project (www.irs.uji.es/merbots). This work has as main objective the design of a bidirectional transport protocol for wireless teleoperation of an underwater robot using high level commands and a progressive image compression algorithm. Preliminary Hardware In the Loop results combining two S2CR 18/34 modems in a scenario with high level of multi-path, a freshwater pool, and the UWSim simulator are presented. Finally, a ROS-based network simulator that is still in an early stage of development is presented. This simulator will be useful for modeling high-level behavior of any communication device, and to improve high level protocols when the real modems are not available.