ARRC Seminar Series - Dr. Dario Pompili

Dr. Dario Pompili, Associate Professor, Rutgers University, NJ, USA

Date of seminar: 24 November 2021, 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm (GST)

Talk topic: Reliable Underwater Acoustic Video Transmission Towards Human-Robot Dynamic Interaction

Abstract:

In the past decade underwater communications have enabled a wide range of applications; there are, however, novel underwater monitoring applications and systems based on human-robot dynamic interaction that require real-time multimedia acquisition and classification. Remotely Operated Vehicles (ROVs) are key instruments to support such interactive applications as they can capture multimedia data from places where humans cannot easily/safely go; however, underwater vehicles are often tethered to the supporting ship by a fiber cable or have to rise periodically to the surface to communicate with a remote station via Radio Frequency (RF) waves, which constrains the mission. Wireless acoustic communication is the typical physical-layer technology for underwater communication; however, video transmissions via acoustic waves are hard to accomplish as the acoustic waves suffer from attenuation, limited bandwidth, Doppler spreading, high propagation delay, high bit error rate, and time-varying channel. For these reasons, state-of-the-art acoustic communication solutions are still mostly focusing on enabling delay-tolerant, low-bandwidth/low-data-rate scalar data transmission or at best low-quality/low-resolution multimedia streaming in the order of few tens of Kbps. This talk focuses on: (1) Novel communication solutions for robust, reliable, and high-data rate underwater multimedia streaming in the order of hundreds of Kbps; (2) Integration of communication methods on a software-defined testbed architecture exploiting MEMS-based Acoustic Vector Sensors (AVSs) to enable processing-intensive physical-layer functionalities as software-defined, but executed in hardware that can be reconfigured in real time by the user based on Quality of Experience (QoE).