Background Flow Sensing for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles Using Model Reduction with Dynamic Mode Decomposition

Autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have received increasing attention among scientific and engineering societies for their superior performances and promising future in marine environments. A key challenge to marine autonomy is the sensing of the background flow environment, which is important for navigation and motion control of AUVs. While existing flow estimation studies typically focus on (quasi-)steady flow fields for AUVs of well-defined shapes, this paper proposes a novel flow sensing algorithm that applies to any dynamic flows for arbitrary AUV shapes. The proposed flow sensing method assimilates distributed pressure measurements through coalescing recursive Bayesian estimation and dynamic mode decomposition (DMD)-based model reduction. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed distributed flow sensing algorithm, both simulation and experimental results are presented on three testing prototypes of different shapes including a Joukowski foil, a triangle, and a rectangle.