Virtual Tethered Autonomous Underwater Vehicle with Communication Constraints

We propose that the two autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) be tethered with an optical link to share information through high-speed optical communication. In for-mation, AUVs need to share position information using acoustic ranging and communications for virtual tethering. To improve the utilization of the limited acoustic channel resources, we plan to differentiate the frequency at which each AUV performs acoustic ranging. We developed a reinforcement learning environment for acoustic ranging and communication decisions between multiple AUVs, and tested it in a simulated environment.