This project investigates the design and applications of Autonomous Mobile Underwater SEnsor networks (AMUSE) consisting of a variable number of sonars (sensors) and vehicles that are deployed to perform collaborative tasks over a given area. Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWA-SNs) are envisioned to enable applications for environmental monitoring of physical and chemical/biological indicators, tactical surveillance, disaster prevention, undersea exploration, and assisted navigation, etc. The major tasks under exploration include UWA-SN self-organization and deployment, self-reconfiguring (MAC, physical layer, and cross-layer design), and mission-aware waveform design/diversity with applications to target recognition, target tracking, and event detection. The AMUSE project is motivated by and targets to solve the following challenges: 1) the sensors in UWA-SN are expensive and mobile, therefore sound self-organization and self-deployment algorithms are needed; 2) waveform design and diversity for UWA-SNs with active sonars are still in its infancy; 3) the transmit and receive data rates are highly asymmetric, which requires new MAC layer design; 4) the underwater channel is impaired by fading, multipath, and doppler shift; 5) the GPS receivers do not work properly in underwater, thus new localization/navigation algorithms are required.
The success of the AMUSE project is able to benefit the two areas of urgent national interests: (1) Instrumentation for monitoring/prediction of natural ocean disasters including storm surges, hurricanes, tsunami, etc. (2) Harbor environments and security. In addition, this project can serve as a vehicle to promote cross-disciplinary graduate and undergraduate research and education, and to encourage the participation of under-represented and female students.
