An Acoustic Communication System for Subsea Robot

Abstract

F o r advanced unmanned untethered subsea robots, an acoustic communication system nust be required to transmit the high-definition and real-time video toward the operator on the support ship. Therefore, it is required to realized a high data rate and a low error rate for transmission of the digitized video. A prototype acoustic communication system applying 16-ary quadrature amplitude modulation (16-QAM) method has been developed to perform a capacity of 5 0 0 kbit/s at maximum transmission range of 60 meters. T o improve the quality o f transmission information, an adaptive equalization technique is also ntroduced in this system. The prototype sys em is briefly described and experimental resu ts are presented.