Low-cost energy measurement and estimation for autonomous underwater vehicles

This work introduces a low-cost energy measurement method and proposes a simple linear model to estimate the vehicle energy consumption when navigating a given trajectory. Experimental results on Nessie VII AUV show that the developed system can be used to measure the energy used during the vehicle´s operations with a good confidence level. Moreover the proposed estimation model can be trained using a simple calibration procedure each time the environmental conditions change or the vehicle´s configuration is altered. The proposed solution is suited to real-time use on low-power embedded devices. The limited use of computation resources mean that this method is well suited for supporting navigation planning and motion control.