Modeling, Simulation and Validation of the Electrical Power Consumption of Mobile Ground Vehicles

Unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) have strict payload limitations and limited on-board free space affecting energy storage capacity, which in turn has an impact on system endurance affecting the vehicle's operational range and its capability to handle certain types of missions. Power requirements are mostly determined by the manufacturer for a specific vehicle configuration, ignoring the impact of possible upgrades, 'off-the-self' add-on sensors. This work reviews and validates vehicle kinematics for small to mid-sized ground vehicles. Furthermore, a Matlab model has been developed to simulate the electrical power consumption including peak power demand and total required energy for user defined applications. Comparison between the simplified method estimating the total mission required energy which assumes 100% utilization and a real scenario showed that the simplified method oversized the power system by 50%