Energy consumption modelling of marine drones and the integration of the model into ROS-based simulation

Abstract

The Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs) are promising solutions for various marine applications such as: maritime navigation, rescue, environmental control, military missions, oceanic maps production, etc. The main advantage of USVs is the ability to execute their functionalities in environments where humans are not able to intervene safely, in addition to their cost and continuous activity. Generally, USVs operate in difficult environmental conditions requiring precision, reliability, and autonomy. To meet these critical requirements, the scientific community is increasingly focusing its research in the USV’s field and their applications. Accordingly, one of the most difficult issues to be resolved in this field is the autonomy and energy limitation problems. Estimating and managing the power consumption of USVs is an important issue to deal with energy minimization techniques such as trajectory planning, task scheduling and optimal design of controllers. In this thesis, we present the energy consumption parameter of USVs into Robot Operating System (ROS) - based simulation through the following contributions: • An analytical model of the energy consumption of differential drive Unmanned Surface Vehicles is developed based on a three-degrees-of-freedom dynamic model of surface vessels. • A reverse engineering approach is proposed allowing the identification of the developed dynamic model’s coefficients and parameters based on a set of scenarios run within the simulation environment presented in [1]. The identified model is used in the development of the consumption model of surface vehicles. • The simulator engine is enriched with power modelling and simulation tools, so that the power consumed by the USV is instantaneously calculated, processed, and returned; thus, the energy required to accomplish a given predefined scenario is available as a new simulation result