Distributed Simulation of the Effects of Autonomous Behavior on Battery Consumption in Ground Vehicles

In autonomous and semi-autonomous ground vehicles, certain controller behavior parameters have been shown to have a large effect on fuel economy, however, relatively little research has been done on the effect of controller parameters on battery consumption for electric and hybrid vehicles. One of the significant challenges to realistically investigating these effects is how computationally intensive it is to perform the types of high-fidelity, multi-disciplinary modeling and simulation that are necessary. In this paper, we present an ongoing research project to combine high-fidelity physics modeling, detailed battery and structural modeling, and parametrized autonomous ground vehicle control systems in order to determine which autonomous behaviors significantly affect battery consumption.