Cooperation and networking in an underwater network composed by heterogeneous assets

Underwater communication and robot technologies have grown rapidly in the last decade. Systems made of underwater unmanned vehicles have moved from single vehicle deployments to systems comprising teams of assets. As of today the possibility to support cooperation and interoperability of heterogeneous platforms is a key issue. The objective of this paper is to present the SUNRISE [1] approach to overcome this limitation through the development of an abstraction layer to support the interoperability of different vehicle control software. SUNRISE also aims at integrating control software with the underwater communication and networking components to create more flexible, modular and capable underwater systems. The developed SUNRISE infrastructure has been evaluated and validated through in lab tests and at-sea experiments, in the Porto harbour, during the REP14 sea trial in the Atlantic Ocean and in the Mediterranean coast of Italy in June 2015, showing promising results. The authors gratefully acknowledge CMRE team, Sapienza team and the Portuguese Navy for their valuable feedback and for their support and help during the REP14 sea trial.