This is the introductory talk to my Masters Thesis titled, Evaluation and Implementation of a Communication System In Small and Lightweight Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs).An autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is a robot which travels underwater without requiring input from an operator, thus novel strategies for tasks such as position control, energy-efficient locomotion and self-localization are developed for the successful operation of such systems. In order to do that, Underwater communication is very important, as any useful task that has to be carried out by an AUV requires some method of communication, either with the base station or with other entities such as nodes of underwater sensor networks (UWSN) or other AUVs.

The idea is to test and evaluate possible methods of communication which should be feasible to be implemented on small and lightweight AUVs, such as µAUVII.

Different communication strategies such as Optical communication, Acoustic Communication, Electromagnetic communication and Visual communication can be evaluated to analyze which are the methods most feasible to implement on µAUVII as per its applications, such as in swarms or team robotics.