Slocum Glider energy measurement and simulation infrastructure

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) are indispensable tools for marine scientists to study the world´s oceans. Depending on their missions, AUVs are equipped with advanced sensors (sonar, cameras, acoustic communication, bio-sensors), have on-board computers for data analysis (image analysis, data compression), and are capable of on-board decision making (resource planning, swarming). Since AUVs operate solely on battery power, power and energy management is a crucial issue. Mission-critical tradeoff decisions have to be made between energy consumption and sensing, data processing, and communication activities. Mission planning has to consider these tradeoffs when provisioning resources for expected future events, or when dealing with changing environmental conditions such weather, water currents, and seafloor profiles. Effective power and energy management requires knowledge about the actual energy consumption of each active component within the AUV. Effective planning requires simulators that can predict energy consumptions based on expected future events and environmental conditions. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of a power measurement infrastructure for the Teledyne Webb research Slocum glider. This infrastructure can be used for online power/energy management or to better understand the time-dependent energy consumption profile of the active glider components during a particular mission. We also discuss the design of a new simulation environment for the Slocum glider which uses the power/energy data obtained by our measurement infrastructure, in addition to seafloor and coastal radar information. We illustrate the effectiveness of the new tools in the context of planning a glider flight across the continental shelf off the coast of New Jersey.