Infrastructure for Large-Scale Tests in Marine Autonomy

This thesis focuses on the development of infrastructure for research with large-scale autonomous marine vehicle fleets and the design of sampling trajectories for compres-sive sensing (CS). The newly developed infrastructure includes a bare-bones acoustic modem and two types of low-cost and scalable vehicles. One vehicle is a holonomic raft designed for station-keeping and precise maneuvering, and the other is a stream-lined kayak for traveling longer distances. The acoustic modem, like the vehicles, is inexpensive and scalable, providing the capability of a large-scale, low-cost underwa-ter acoustic network. With these vehicles and modems we utilize compressive sensing, a recently developed framework for sampling sparse signals that offers dramatic re-ductions in the number of samples required for high fidelity reconstruction of a field. Our novel CS sampling techniques introduce engineering constraints including move-ment and measurement costs to better apply CS to sampling with mobile agents. The vehicles and modems, along with compressive sensing, strengthen the movemen