Acoustic Communication Constraints in Cooperative Autonomous Underwater Vehicle Systems: Experimental Insights and Operational Lessons

Abstract

Cooperative autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) systems are increasingly used for maritime surveillance, seabed mapping, infrastructure inspection, environmental monitoring, and distributed data acquisition. Despite significant advances in navigation and control, the operational deployment of multi-AUV systems remains constrained by the underwater acoustic communication channel. Acoustic links are affected by limited bandwidth, propagation delays, packet losses, and environmental variability, making reliable information exchange challenging for cooperative underwater operations. This paper investigates the impact of acoustic communication constraints on cooperative multi-AUV operations using experimental and simulation-based insights. The study combines findings from terrain-aided navigation, formation control, and swarm coordination, highlighting the influence of communication latency and update frequency on overall system performance. Results demonstrate that modern navigation and control algorithms partially compensate for communication outages through estimation and decentralised decisionmaking; however, swarm performance remains governed by communication availability rather than navigation accuracy alone. The findings indicate that future underwater swarm systems should prioritise communication efficiency, adaptive information exchange, and communicationaware mission planning. The findings highlight that communication-aware autonomy, rather than communication throughput alone, will be a key enabler of future cooperative underwater systems.