Reinforcement learning based robot navigation using illegal actions for autonomous docking of surface vehicles in unknown environments

• Type: Article in International Scientific Journal
• Date: 2024

Authors

Pereira, MI (Author) Other; Pinto, AM (Author) FEUP

Journal

Title: Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence

Vol. 133

ISSN: 0952-1976

Publisher: Elsevier

Indexing

ISI Web of Knowledge - 2 Citations

Scopus - 6 Citations

Other information

Authenticus ID: P-010-C65

DOI: 10.1016/j.engappai.2024.108506

Abstract (EN): Autonomous Surface Vehicles (ASVs) are bound to play a fundamental role in the maintenance of offshore wind farms. Robust navigation for inspection vehicles should take into account the operation of docking within a harbouring structure, which is a critical and still unexplored maneuver. This work proposes an end-to-end docking approach for ASVs, based on Reinforcement Learning (RL), which teaches an agent to tackle collision- free navigation towards a target pose that allows the berthing of the vessel. The developed research presents a methodology that introduces the concept of illegal actions to facilitate the vessel's exploration during the learning process. This method improves the adopted Actor-Critic (AC) framework by accelerating the agent's optimization by approximately 38.02%. A set of comprehensive experiments demonstrate the accuracy and robustness of the presented method in scenarios with simulated environmental constraints (Beaufort Scale and Douglas Sea Scale), and a diversity of docking structures. Validation with two different real ASVs in both controlled and real environments demonstrates the ability of this method to enable safe docking maneuvers without prior knowledge of the scenario.

Language: English

Type (Professor's evaluation): Scientific

No. of pages: 20