Marine Internet of Things Platforms for Interoperability of Marine Robotic Agents: An Overview of Concepts and Architectures

Abstract

The creation of a Marine Internet of Things platform, including the Underwater Internet of Things, is needed to ensure the interaction and digital navigation of heterogeneous marine robotic agents. It is necessary to combine the following robotic agents: autonomous underwater vehicles, remotely operated vehicles, active and passive marine sensors, buoys, underwater sonar stations, coastal communication posts, and other elements of the platform. To ensure the interaction of all these elements, it is necessary to use a common communication system within the platform, as well as a common navigation and control system to solve complex problems of the navigation and control of the movement of robotic agents in order to implement a joint mission to collect and transmit data, including video information in real time. The architecture of the Marine Internet of Things platform must first be defined in order to use a unified approach to data exchange. This article provides an overview of approaches to determining the architectures of network underwater and marine communication systems based on the concept of the Internet of Things. This paper provides a comprehensive study of MIoT applications, challenges, and architectures. The main contributions of this paper are summarized as follows: we introduce potential MIoT applications; we point out the challenges of MIoT (i.e., the differences between MIoT and IoT); and we analyze the MIoT system architecture.