Simulation model for energy consumption and acoustic underwater communication of autonomous underwater vehicles

Abstract

Recently, cooperative autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have been deployed in application areas such as surveillance and protection of maritime infrastructures for inspection and monitoring purposes. These cooperative methodologies require wireless transmission of data between the different AUVs operating in the underwater environment. Communication over ranges exceeding 100 m exclusively relies on underwater acoustic communication. However, the propagating acoustic waves suffer from several challenges due to the presence of path loss, multi-path propagation, the slow and variant propagation speed, background noise, and Doppler distortion. Since the power supply of the AUVs is limited, communication must be very energy efficient and energy constraints have to be known to be able to plan the mission of AUVs. Due to the difficulties of real experiments, the modeling and simulation of the energy consumption and underwater acoustic communication play an essential role in studying and developing these systems. We provide a modular simulation model for the energy consumption and acoustic underwater communication of AUVs implemented in the network simulator OMNeT++ using the INET framework. More specifically, we extend several INET modules in such a way as to reflect the characteristics of AUVs and underwater communication. We study and analyze the AUVs’ energy consumption and dependence of the message quality on different properties such as those mentioned above.

A Comparative Review on Acoustic and Inductive Power Transfer

“…Contactless ultrasonic power transfer systems based on multifocal transmission acoustic phase holograms have a wide range of applications, including medical devices, consumer electronics, and industrial automation. Next, Danielis et al, [84] proposed this study's simulation model for energy consumption and acoustic underwater communication of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) is a mathematical model meant to estimate the energy consumption of an AUV throughout its mission and assess the acoustic communication between the AUV and a distant station. The model considers many parameters that influence energy usage, such as vehicle speed, mission length, and climatic conditions.…”

Robust Control of Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Using Delta-Sigma-Based 1-bit Controllers

“…However, remote control of AUV is a challenging task resulting from its exposure to the harsh maritime environment and limited underwater communication [2]. For successful local navigation of AUVs, various researchers have proposed different control strategies for motion control of AUVs, such as dynamic position control, trajectory tracking control, path following control, heading control, etc.…”

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Exploring Autonomous and Remotely Operated Vehicles in Offshore Structure Inspections

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