It is a common practice to attach a transponder to various underwater assets (both static and mobile) for short and long term field deployments. These transponders can act as a beacon that can be utilized for localization. An underwater vehicle (e.g. AUV, ROV) will be able to do sequential ranging to find the location of the transponder during a search and rescue operation.

A common problem in mobile robotics deals with answering the question: “Where am I?”. If the robot is equipped with GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver, it can be localized accurately. Unfortunately, GPS doesn’t work underwater. For GPS to work underwater, the GPS receiver should be able to receive the Radio Frequency (RF) signals from GPS satellites. But RF signals do not propagate well in water and therefore GPS receiver cannot receive the signals underwater. Acoustic communication is the most promising mode of communication underwater. With static reference underwater acoustic modems acting as “satellites” in the ocean, we can localize an underwater robot/vehicle.

Imagine you are out at sea, doing underwater communications field experiments, with underwater acoustic modems deployed from a boat or a vessel. If you are a researcher, you might be interested in transmitting your custom designed signals to study the underwater channel. If you are commercial company manufacturing modems, you might be testing the localization performance of your modems. Regardless of the application, one of the most valuable metric that can be attached with each and every data frame or signal transmission and reception is the location information of the modems, i.e. geotagging the data (similar to time-stamping data).

UnetStack runs on several modems, simulators, and even laptops with sound cards. But what if we have a modem that UnetStack doesn’t already run on? And we want it to! Well … we need to write a driver for that modem. It really isn’t that difficult, and this blog will walk you through the basics.