Design and development of a wireless communication link for underwater robot system

• Main Author: Simbulan, Kristan Bryan Caluntad
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 2013
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_masteral/4385
• Institution: De La Salle University

Communication between land and water has been the interest of many researchers today. The need to explore the waters has crossed the minds of many people because of the need to discover hostile areas for extraction of knowledge and resources. This research tries to develop a means of communicating underwater by developing two links and integrating them together. The first link is aerial communications using Wi-Fi, and the other one is acoustic communication using an acoustic modem. Developing the Wi-Fi link is purely software as two laptops are set to communicate to each other. Each laptop runs with a Microsoft Visual C++ Windows Sockets code. The first laptop is named the Land-based Control Centre (LCC) and the other one is named Water Surface Translating Agent (WSTA). The WSTA converts the received Wi-Fi signal into acoustic signal. The acoustic communication makes use of software FSK modulation technique by varying some parameters in the DDS algorithm, and a hardware demodulation using XR2211. Several experiments are performed and the results proved that the Wi-Fi link is reliable and has a consistent performance. While the acoustic modem is able to send and receive data underwater, the results showed that it can only operate at short distance of up to 1.75 meters. Also, certain values of Bit Error Rates for the acoustic modem are observed for every baud rate, distance, and frequency of operation used.