Low-cost AUV Swarm Localization Through Multimodal Underwater Acoustic Networks

The use of swarms of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) for environmental monitoring operations could provide important data about pollution, but is currently limited by the high costs of the AUVs and their communication equipment. In this work, we design a system that exploits a multimodal network, composed by both USBL low-frequency and low-cost high frequency acoustic modems, at a much lower cost than standard single mode deployments, and uses distributed sensing and communication-based ranging to perform the localization of an AUV swarm. Our system is able to maintain a positioning error below 13 m over long time periods in different operational scenarios, at a fraction of the cost of the single mode system, and concentrating all the expensive equipment in the leader AUV.