Related papers: Adaptive Probabilistic Tack Manoeuvre Decision for…
Sailing robots provide a low-cost solution to conduct the ocean missions such as marine exploration, pollution detection, and border surveillance, etc. However, compared with other propeller-driven surface vessels, sailboat suffers in…
In match race sailing, competitors must steer their boats upwind in the presence of unpredictably evolving weather. Combined with the tacking motion necessary to make upwind progress, this makes it natural to model their path-planning as a…
Sailboat path-planning is a natural hybrid control problem (due to continuous steering and occasional "tack-switching" maneuvers), with the actual path-to-target greatly affected by stochastically evolving wind conditions. Previous studies…
Exploring lunar lava tubes requires robots to traverse without human intervention. Because pre-trained policies cannot fully cover all possible terrain conditions, our goal is to enable adaptive policy switching, where the robot selects an…
We study the dynamics of sail membranes during a tacking maneuver, when the sail angle of attack is reversed in order to sail upwind. In successful tacking the sail flips to the mirror-image shape, while in unsuccessful tacking the sail…
Significant wave height forecasting is a key problem in ocean data analytics. This task affects several maritime operations, such as managing the passage of vessels or estimating the energy production from waves. In this work, we focus on…
Automated docking technologies of marine boats have been enlightened by an increasing number of literature. This paper contributes to the literature by proposing a mathematical framework that automates "trailer loading" in the presence of…
Accurate marine wind forecasts are essential for safe navigation, ship routing, and energy operations, yet they remain challenging because observations over the ocean are sparse, heterogeneous, and temporally variable. We reformulate wind…
Marine vessel re-identification technology is an important component of intelligent shipping systems and an important part of the visual perception tasks required for marine surveillance. However, unlike the situation on land, the maritime…
Flapping-fin underwater vehicle propulsion systems provide an alternative to propeller-driven systems in situations that require involve a constrained environment or require high maneuverability. Testing new configurations through…
This paper presents a method for probabilistic wind power forecasting that quantifies and integrates uncertainties from weather forecasts and weather-to-power conversion. By addressing both uncertainty sources, the method achieves…
Autonomous agents often require multiple strategies to solve complex tasks, but determining when to switch between strategies remains challenging. This research introduces a reinforcement learning technique to learn switching thresholds…
A simulated annealing based algorithm is presented for the determination of optimal ship routes through the minimization of a cost function. This cost function is a weighted sum of the time of voyage and the voyage comfort (safety is taken…
Landing an unmanned aerial vehicle unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) on top of an unmanned surface vehicle (USV) in harsh open waters is a challenging problem, owing to forces that can damage the UAV due to a severe roll and/or pitch angle of…
Using a novel toy nautical navigation environment, we show that dynamic programming can be used when only incomplete information about a partially observed Markov decision process (POMDP) is known. By incorporating uncertainty into our…
The installation process of offshore wind turbines requires the use of expensive jack-up vessels. These vessels regularly report their position via the Automatic Identification System (AIS). This paper introduces a novel approach of…
Albatrosses can travel a thousand kilometers daily over the oceans. This feat is achieved through dynamic soaring, a non-flapping flight strategy where propulsive energy is extracted from horizontal wind shears. Dynamic soaring has been…
The deployment of agile autonomous systems in challenging, unstructured environments requires adaptation capabilities and robustness to uncertainties. Existing robust and adaptive controllers, such as those based on model predictive control…
Predicting future trajectories of nearby objects, especially under occlusion, is a crucial task in autonomous driving and safe robot navigation. Prior works typically neglect to maintain uncertainty about occluded objects and only predict…
We present a novel outdoor navigation algorithm to generate stable and efficient actions to navigate a robot to reach a goal. We use a multi-stage training pipeline and show that our approach produces policies that result in stable and…