AmphiLight: Direct Air-Water Communication With Laser Light

AbstractThe underwater world is still largely unexplored yet surveying and monitoring submerged sites is fundamental for many applications, including archaeology, biology, and disaster response [1, 2, 3]. One of the challenges for underwater autonomous deployments is limited communication between assets underwater and in the air. One conventional strategy is to periodically let the underwater vehicle surface to share data [4], which is inefficient due to time not being spent on the task. Another strategy is to deploy a network of buoys at the water surface [5], connected to both the underwater assets (via acoustic transducers) and the ground station (via Wi-Fi). This deployment configuration increases the cost and logistical overhead, limiting the overall scalability of the system.