Human-Guided Autonomy for Acoustically Tethered Underwater Vehicles

Recent under-ice Arctic AUV expeditions [1] have shown that polar operations require careful coordination between subsea vehicles and surface ships during vehicle recovery. In addition, the complexity or AUV launches and recoveries encourages telemetering AUV science data to allow scientists greater decision-making power while an AUV dive is underway. Reliable underwater communication, however, imposes strict bandwidth limitations. This paper presents a method for summarizing scalar vehicle science and state telemetry over low-bandwidth acoustic links, along with a topside display for presenting the data to surface observers.