Unmanned Marine Vehicle Cooperative Offshore Infrastructure Monitoring with Multimodal Underwater Feature Transmission

Cooperation between sauv and sasv can greatly enhance their usefulness in wide-area underwater monitoring tasks for critical infrastructure such as offshore pipelines. The sauv can provide a close-up view of the pipeline and physically interact with it if any maintenance is needed, while the asv can act as an offloading platform for complex computational tasks that are beyond the capabilities of auv on-board hardware. However, the communication requirements are significant, and the harsh underwater propagation environment requires an asv to move close to sauv when they need assistance. In this work, we propose the ier scheme, which combines multimodal communication and subsequent interaction rounds to significantly reduce false alarms, reducing the mission time and the system's energy consumption. We found that the proposed ier protocol outperforms the naive ser approach by an order of magnitude in terms of mission time and energy consumption, significantly improving the effectiveness ...