Geophysical surveying with marine networked mobile robotic systems: The WiMUST project

The WiMUST proposal (Widely scalable Mobile Underwater Sonar Technology) has been favorably evaluated by the European Commission and the project is expected to kick off in the near future. It aims at expanding and improving the functionalities of current cooperative marine robotic systems, effectively enabling distributed acoustic array technologies for geophysical surveying. This paper describes the main features of the envisaged developments, with a focus on communication and networking issues