  Controlling a fleet of autonomous underwater vehicles can be challenging due
to low bandwidth communication between agents. This paper proposes to address
this challenge by optimizing the quantization design of the communications
between agents for use in distributed algorithms. The proposed approach
considers two stages for the problem of multi-AUV control: an off-line stage
where the quantization design is optimized; and an on-line stage based on a
distributed model predictive control formulation and a distributed optimization
algorithm with quantization. The standard properties of recursive feasibility
and stability of the closed loop systems are analyzed, and simulations used to
demonstrate the overall behaviour of the proposed approach.
