Underwater Acoustic Networks: The FP7 UAN Project

https://doi.org/10.3182/20120919-3-IT-2046.00038Get rights and content

Abstract

The EU-funded project UAN - Underwater Acoustic Network aims at conceiving, developing and testing at sea an innovative and operational concept for integrating in a unique communication system submerged, surface and aerial sensors with the objective of protecting off-shore and coastline critical infrastructures. A crucial aspect of the project consisted in the use of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) as mobile nodes in the underwater acoustic communication network. In particular, AUVs have the role of adapting the network geometry to the variation of the acoustic channel. This paper reports on the project concept and vision as well as on the progress of its various development phases. The recent at-sea successes that have been demonstrated within the UAN framework are detailed and results of the final UAN project demonstration, UAN11, held in the May of 2011, are reported. The UAN network was in operation for five continuous days with up to five nodes, of which three of them were mobile nodes.

Keywords

Underwater communication networks
distributed control
autonomous vehicles
autonomous mobile robots
AUVs

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The work presented in this paper was funded by the European Union, 7th Framework Programme (FP7), Grant n. 225669.

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