Managing communication challenges in vehicle networks for remote maritime operations

As the need for a sustainable presence in maritime operations rises so does the application of teams of autonomous vehicles as a means to meet this challenge. Although these teams present a unique opportunity to explore more complex concepts of operation, as well as more complex scenarios, they invariably have to tackle issues with maintaining communication. Therefore, the deployment and maintenance of heterogeneous multi-vehicle teams in an remote operational maritime environment poses a series of challenges not just associated with autonomy, planning and coordination but also communication access. To address this, new concepts of operation must be explored, alongside planning and control software, to ascertain operational limitations. In doing so the viability of autonomous teams' use in larger scale scenarios is increased. This paper presents operational vignettes where these limitations are explored.