muNet-AUVSim: Integrated Communication and Navigation Simulator for Underwater Vehicles

We present a modular simulation framework, muNet-AUVSim, for underwater vehicle swarming simulations. The framework integrates underwater wireless communication as a solution to enable information sharing among swarm members, providing time-stepped simulations for prototyping guidance and control algorithms, communication strategies, and sensor applications. A case study demonstrates the use of Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) guidance for pollution source localization. Autonomous Underwater Vehicle (AUV) swarms of varying size demonstrate convergence under communication limitations with performance comparable to direct memory access in some cases.