Multi-objective robust energy management for environment powered unmanned surface vehicles

Abstract

The environment powered unmanned surface vehicle (EPUSV) is capable of achieving large-range and long-term marine operations by harvesting abundant environment energy. However, considering the intermittency of environment energy, limitation on battery capacity and varieties of loads, it is necessary to control and coordinate the electric devices of EPUSV to exploit energy efficiently. To address this issue, an optimization-based energy management strategy (EMS) is proposed in this paper to achieve optimal management for the devices of EPUSV. The operation constraints and relevant objectives of different types of devices are firstly modeled through mix-integer nonlinear programming (MINLP) method. The uncertainty parameters in the model are addressed by robust optimization method. Then various task modes are defined based on the preference for different objectives. Simulations indicate that the proposed method is able to achieve optimal scheduling for each device while satisfying the underlying operation constraints. Besides, the adaptability for different kinds of tasks and the robustness to the fluctuation of uncertainty parameters of the proposed EMS is analyzed and discussed.