Autonomous Port Navigation With Ranging Sensors Using Model-Based Reinforcement Learning ...

Autonomous shipping has recently gained much interest in the research community. However, little research focuses on inland - and port navigation, even though this is identified by countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands as an essential step towards a sustainable future. These environments pos...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Herremans, Siemen, Anwar, Ali, Troch, Arne, Ravijts, Ian, Vangeneugden, Maarten, Mercelis, Siegfried, Hellinckx, Peter
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:unknown
Published: arXiv 2023
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2312.05257
https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.05257
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Summary:Autonomous shipping has recently gained much interest in the research community. However, little research focuses on inland - and port navigation, even though this is identified by countries such as Belgium and the Netherlands as an essential step towards a sustainable future. These environments pose unique challenges, since they can contain dynamic obstacles that do not broadcast their location, such as small vessels, kayaks or buoys. Therefore, this research proposes a navigational algorithm which can navigate an inland vessel in a wide variety of complex port scenarios using ranging sensors to observe the environment. The proposed methodology is based on a machine learning approach that has recently set benchmark results in various domains: model-based reinforcement learning. By randomizing the port environments during training, the trained model can navigate in scenarios that it never encountered during training. Furthermore, results show that our approach outperforms the commonly used dynamic window ... : Presented at 42nd International Conference on Ocean, Offshore & Arctic Engineering. June 11 - 16, 2023. Melbourne, Australia ...