Robot Operating System (ROS) talks underwater: an open-source communication middleware to control underwater vehicles

Underwater robots are usually remotely controlled from the base station using umbilical cables due to the propagation problems of electromagnetic waves in the water, which are strongly attenuated after a few centimeters. It is possible to overcome this constraint by employing acoustic networks to communicate with underwater vehicles to send commands and receive sensor informations, by creating an ad hoc system tailored for each specific scenario. Advancements in underwater acoustic transmissions allowed us to introduce a general approach which can be exploited to use generic robot applications both with standard Ethernet networks and with acoustic underwater networks. In this paper we present a middleware layer module that enables any Robot Operating System (ROS) application to exchange informations through the underwater acoustic channel, without making any change in the user-level control logic.