Ocean Current-Harnessing Stage-Gated MPC: Monotone Cost Shaping and Speed-to-Fly for Energy-Efficient AUV Navigation

2026-01-31

AI Summary

This work addresses the challenge of energy-efficient navigation for autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) in ocean currents, where limited endurance often prevents effective exploitation of favorable flow fields. The authors propose a stage-gated model predictive control (MPC) framework that dynamically evaluates a scalar “benefit” metric of predicted currents along the planning horizon and selectively activates lightweight cost terms to reduce energy consumption without compromising mission performance. Key innovations include Monotonic Cost Shaping (MCS) and Speed Tuning Feedback (STF), which guarantee bounded energy gain, ensure the objective function is no worse than a baseline, and enable near-zero relative-flow gliding. All components are designed for plug-and-play integration into existing MPC architectures. Simulations using BlueROV2 in realistic current fields demonstrate significant energy savings while maintaining arrival time and constraint satisfaction comparable to conventional MPC.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Planning with Language Models
• Humans and AI: Human-Aware Planning and Behavior Prediction
• Multiagent Systems: Multiagent Planning

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Energy management for devices in mobile Web and WoT environments
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy
• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: On-Device user modeling, personalization, and recommendation

Abstract

Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) are a highly promising technology for ocean exploration and diverse offshore operations, yet their practical deployment is constrained by energy efficiency and endurance. To address this, we propose Current-Harnessing Stage-Gated MPC, which exploits ocean currents via a per-stage scalar which indicates the"helpfulness"of ocean currents. This scalar is computed along the prediction horizon to gate lightweight cost terms only where the ocean currents truly aids the control goal. The proposed cost terms, that are merged in the objective function, are (i) a Monotone Cost Shaping (MCS) term, a help-gated, non-worsening modification that relaxes along-track position error and provides a bounded translational energy rebate, guaranteeing the shaped objective is never larger than a set baseline, and (ii) a speed-to-fly (STF) cost component that increases the price of thrust and softly matches ground velocity to the ocean current, enabling near zero water-relative"gliding". All terms are C1 and integrate as a plug-and-play in MPC designs. Extensive simulations with the BlueROV2 model under realistic ocean current fields show that the proposed approach achieves substantially lower energy consumption than conventional predictive control while maintaining comparable arrival times and constraint satisfaction.

Problem

• Autonomous Underwater Vehicles
• energy efficiency
• ocean currents
• MPC
• navigation

Innovation

• Stage-Gated MPC
• Monotone Cost Shaping
• Speed-to-Fly
• Ocean Current Harnessing
• Energy-Efficient AUV Navigation