Hierarchical Motion Planning and Tracking for Autonomous Vehicles Using Global Heuristic Based Potential Field and Reinforcement Learning Based Predictive Control

The autonomous vehicle is widely applied in various ground operations, in which motion planning and tracking control are becoming the key technologies to achieve autonomous driving. In order to further improve the performance of motion planning and tracking control, an efficient hierarchical framework containing motion planning and tracking...

Learning from Demonstrations of Critical Driving Behaviours Using Driver's Risk Field

In recent years, imitation learning (IL) has been widely used in industry as the core of autonomous vehicle (AV) planning modules. However, previous IL works show sample inefficiency and low generalisation in safety-critical scenarios, on which they are rarely tested. As a result, IL planners can reach a performance plateau where adding more...

Multi-Objective Cooperative Control for a Ship-Towing System in Congested Water Traffic Environments

This paper proposes a multi-objective cooperative control method for a ship-towing system in congested water traffic environments. The control objectives are to coordinate multiple autonomous tugboats for transporting a ship to: (i) follow the waypoints, (ii) adjust the heading, (iii) track the speed profile, and (iv) resolve collisions. The...

Multi-vessel cooperative speed regulation for ship manipulation in towing scenarios

This paper proposes a multi-agent control scheme for multiple physically interconnected tugboats performing a ship towing process. These tugs are coordinated by two control layers. In the higher layer, the supervisory controller outputs the desired towing forces and reference trajectories for the tugs. This information is used by a tug's...

Cooperative multi-agent control for autonomous ship towing under environmental disturbances

Among the promising application of autonomous surface vessels (ASVs) is the utilization of multiple autonomous tugs for manipulating a floating object such as an oil platform, a broken ship, or a ship in port areas. Considering the real conditions and operations of maritime practice, this paper proposes a multi-agent control algorithm to...

Cooperative control of autonomous tugs for ship towing

Autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) are seeing a significant development over the last decade. In recent years, their commercial applications are attracting the attention of many companies. One of the promising subjects is to develop autonomous tugs for ship berthing. This paper focuses on the cooperative control of autonomous tugs for ship...