Design and implementation of unmanned boat platform for underwater acoustic communication emulation

Underwater acoustic communication emulation tasks are generally expensive and time-consuming. In this paper, we design and build an unmanned boat based emulation platform for underwater acoustic communication, which supports the cloud to initialize task orders and send/receive waveform data in real time. The unmanned boat combines navigation system, wireless bridge, 2.4G wireless remote control module, and 4G mobile module to provide centimeter-level positioning and multi-mode communication control. The peripheral equipment includes an IP camera, a crawler type fixed lift winch, and a shipboard hydroacoustic transducer. Meanwhile, the unmanned boat software is designed to support multi-mode communication control of the host computer, remote control, and communication platform, update real-time position information and synchronize with the host computer and the cloud. The host computer software has control and monitoring functions, which can obtain the position and attitude information of the unmanned boat, the real-time camera screen, and issue commands to control the unmanned boat. The hardware and software performed well in the field test, such as transducers placement at a specified depth and underwater acoustic communication experiments.