Computation of Empowerment for an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle*

The paper addresses the computation of the information-theoretic empowerment measure for a simplified vertical plane dynamic model of an eFolaga autonomous underwater vehicle. Empowerment can be used to measure how much influence a vehicle has on its behavior, and it identifies desirable states of the vehicle, hence it can act as an intrinsic cost function to use during a mission. Online empowerment computation can be exploited within complex autonomous robotics missions. The proposed approach is being developed in the framework of a H2020 underwater robotics research project (Widely scalable Mobile Underwater Sonar Technology) to improve the autonomy of autonomous underwater vehicles for acoustic seismic applications.