Autonomous Sailing with Sim-to-Real Reinforcement Learning

Facing the critical challenge of reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the maritime industry, this thesis explores the potential of smart control systems using Reinforcement Learning (RL) for autonomous sailing. Traditional controls for sailing fall short in navigating the complex, dynamic conditions of maritime environments. RL has shown...

Uncertainty-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Flight Control: Mastering the Mystery of Flight

In the rapidly evolving aviation sector, the quest for safer and more efficient flight operations has historically relied on traditional Automatic Flight Control Systems (AFCS) based on high-fidelity models. However, such models not only incur high development costs but also struggle to adapt to new, complex aircraft designs and unexpected...

Effects of Partial Observability Solver Methods on Training and Final Policies in Autonomous Driver RL: How do different methods for dealing with partial observability in the environment influence training and the robustness of final policies under various testing conditions?

Autonomous driving is a complex problem that can potentially be solved using artificial intelligence. The complexity stems from the system's need to understand the surroundings and make appropriate decisions. However, there are various challenges in constructing such a sophisticated system. One of the main challenges is to make the agent learn...

Interaction-Aware Motion Planning in Crowded Dynamic Environments

Autonomous robots will profoundly impact our society, making our roads safer, reducing labor costs and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and improving our life quality. However, to make that happen, robots need to navigate among humans, which is extremely difficult. Firstly, humans do not explicitly communicate their intentions and use intuition...

Reinforcement Learning for Switching of Semiautomated Vehicles Under Uncomfortable Driving Situations

Over the last two decades, autonomous driving has progressed from science fiction to a real possibility and rapidly developing. However, autonomous driving technology has significant weaknesses and is not safe in unexpected conditions. As a result, automobile manufacturers insist that the driver remains in the driver's seat even while the...

Reinforcement Learning for Switching Control of Semi-automated Vehicles with Driver Fatigue

Automated driving is a rapidly growing technology nowadays. Semi-automated driving is a subpart of automated driving which has multiple driving modes where both driver and automated module can take control. But full safety and comfort guarantees cannot still be given to the drivers. In this project, research has been done to ensure driver safety...

Reinforcement Learning approach for decision-making in driver control shifting for semi-autonomous driving

Semi-autonomous driving innovations aim to bridge the gap to fully autonomous driving by co-operating with human drivers to lead to optimal choices on who should drive in different scenarios by offering different automation levels. However, in the present day, known semi-autonomous driving solutions do not generalise to every complex case of...

Safe Reinforcement Learning by Shielding for Autonomous Vehicles

In the past few years, there has been much research in the field of Autonomous Vehicles (AV). If AVs are implemented in our daily lives, this could have many advantages. Before this can happen, safe driver models need to be designed which control the AVs. One technique that is suitable to create these models is Reinforcement Learning (RL). A...

Obstacle avoidance for quadrotors using reinforcement learning and obstacle-airflow interactions

This research investigates and proposes a new method for obstacle detection and avoidance on quadrotors. One that does not require the addition of any sensors, but relies solely on measurements from the accelerometer and rotor controllers. The detection of obstacles is based on the principle that the airflow around a quadrotor changes when the...

Exploring reinforcement learning methods for autonomous sequencing and spacing of aircraft

Research on reinforcement learning algorithms to play complex video games have brought forth controllers surpassing human performance. This paper explores the possibilities of applying these techniques to the sequencing and spacing of aircraft. Two experiments are performed. First a single aircraft must learn to fly a 4D trajectory using only...

Reinforcement Learning Across Timescales

This project addresses a fundamental problem faced by many reinforcement learning agents. Commonly used reinforcement learning agents can be seen to have deteriorating performances at increasing frequencies, as they are unable to correctly learn the ordering of expected returns for actions that are applied. We call this the disappearing...