Robotic networks for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV’s) are an area where efficient use of the communications channel can increase both the mission time and the amount of information communicated between the AUVs, thus resulting in a more effective mission. The traffic in robotic networks must be managed in such a way that takes into account transmission delay, power efficiency, and traditional network measures such as queue length, throughput, and bandwidth efficiency. System optimization of all these criteria is possible because of the cooperative nature of robotic networks. This paper presents a procedure for con structing optimal controllers that limit and route information flow in a network of AUVs. Particular attention is paid to the objectives of maximizing throughput and bandwidth efficiency while minimizing power consumption and queue length. A receding horizon control approach is adopted and shown to yield piecewise continuous optimal controllers that are unique.

This paper addresses the problems associated with missions using multiple cooperating autonomous underwater vehicles. In such missions, inter-vehicle communication is an important requirement upon which coordination strategy and intelligence decision making functions can be built. This paper presents briefly our current modeling and simulation work on characterizing the vehicle communication performance, together with some of the preliminary results. Even with much simplification of scenario modeling, simulation results exhibit intricate communication characteristics, and they can vary significantly as a function of mission requirements and scenarios.