Low-power microcontroller-based acoustic modem for underwater robot communication

Abstract

This paper presents a low-power microcontroller-based acoustic modem for low-range communication based on aspects of whale and dolphin communication. The approach is to decrease influences by using a frequency shift keying (FSK) modulation combined with frequency hopping spread spectrum (FHSS). Addressing individual recipients (unicast) as well as a group (multicast) or all recipients (broadcast) is done by spreading the outgoing signal by orthogonal signatures. Us-ing these signatures means an overhead of the transmitted data but increases the interference resistance and the reliability of the communication. 1