Waterfall Solutions enables energy harvesting by autonomous vehicles
In response to the MoD's request for innovative solutions to reduce operational dependency on fossil fuels, Waterfall Solutions has developed a flexible sensor management framework for Autonomous Vehicles (AVs) that couples power management with AV performance in carrying out typical tasks, such as searching for and tracking targets. The initial study, completed in November 2009, was funded by the UK Ministry of Defence’s Centre for Defence Enterprise.
The framework enables AV teams to exploit energy harvesting opportunities from ambient energy sources such as solar and wind power, and thereby increases their ability to engage in long-endurance, hazardous tasks. Within the proposed framework, an AV team cooperatively decides how to re-position its sensors based on the power required to re-position a sensor, how much additional power is available at the new position given the efficiency of the harvesting technology, and the system performance in the revised configuration.
The benefit of this approach was demonstrated using Waterfall Solutions’ Cerberus software tool which permits the simulation of complete AV scenarios. Scenarios using solar- and biomass-powered Autonomous Ground Vehicle teams to track targets were simulated. The results showed that the use of our integrated sensor and power management framework can increase the expected operational lifetime of an AV team, without sacrificing tracking performance.