Smart Underwater Positioning System and Simultaneous Communication

This paper touches a problem of development of effective technology of underwater positioning, which allows control position of more than one object i.e. submarines, remotely operated underwater robots or divers. The paper presents a solution which bases on the use of a modulated ultrasound waveform instead of bunch of square-shaped pulses utilized by a traditional positioning systems. The proposed system can be seen as smart because it not only solves a positioning problem but also delivers communication link between a supervising ship and remotely controlled objects. Some preliminary results of experiments with real underwater robots are also presented. The resultant relative positional accuracy was about 1m and the data rate can be estimated about 1 kb/s.