A team at the University of Washington has developed the first underwater 3D-positioning app for smart devices. “Mobile devices today can work nearly anywhere on Earth.” said lead author Tuochao Chen, a UW doctoral student in the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering. “But the one place where we still hadn’t made mobile devices work was underwater. It’s kind of the final frontier.”
Previous underwater positioning systems have relied on strategically placed buoys, but these systems are expensive and cumbersome to deploy. The UW team found that such buoys aren’t necessary. With the app, if the dive leader has at least one other diver visible, the group’s devices can send acoustic signals to each other through their microphones and speakers and use the timestamps to estimate each diver’s distance. Based on these distances, the app can estimate the group’s formation and each diver’s location. If a device also tracks depth, as sport monitors like the Apple Watch Ultra or the Garmin Descent do, the system can locate divers in 3D.
