Design and Evaluation of an Acoustic Modem for a Small Autonomous Unmanned Vehicle

Design of underwater acoustic (UWA) modems for compact-sized, underwater platforms such as autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) is challenging because of the practical requirement to keep an engineering balance between the performance and the system overhead. Considering this type of mobile communication scenario, Doppler spread as well as the multipath draws substantial attention in implementing the system’s design and engineering. Specifically, for a small AUV, the large computational complexity of real-time resampling for the classic Doppler correction poses significant difficulty for the limited capability of the low-cost processor. In this paper, by adopting an adjustable AD (analog-to-digital) sampling rate, a Doppler compensation approach is proposed to enable low-complexity hardware implementation. Based on this, a direct sequence spread spectrum (DSSS) acoustic modem is designed for a low-cost, small-sized AUV. Meanwhile, the performance evaluation of this acoustic modem is conducted in terms of the robustness upon varying Doppler as well as AUV integration. Finally, experimental results performed on a commercial, small-sized AUV under different speeds are reported to verify the effectiveness of the proposed acoustic modem.