Unmanned surface vehicle energy consumption modelling under various realistic disturbances integrated into simulation environment

Abstract

Energy consumption estimation and management of the maritime Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV) is an important issue to deal with energy minimization techniques such as path planning, tasks scheduling, etc. In this paper, we introduce the energy consumption parameter in USV simulation through three contributions: 1) An analytic USV's energy consumption model is developed based on the three-degrees-of-freedom dynamic model of surface vessels. 2) A reverse engineering approach is proposed to identify the previously used dynamic model parameters based on a set of scenarios executed within a recent simulation environment. 3) The simulator engine is enriched with the consumption modelling tools such that the power absorbed by the USV is instantaneously calculated and returned; thus, the required energy of any predefined scenario is available as a new simulation result