Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Path Control and Optimization for Unmanned Ships

Abstract

Unmanned ship navigates on the water in an autonomous or semiautonomous way, which can be widely used in maritime transportation, intelligence collection, maritime training and testing, reconnaissance, and evidence collection. In this paper, we use deep reinforcement learning to solve the optimization problem in the path planning and management of unmanned ships. Specifically, we take the waiting time (phase and duration) at the corner of the path as the optimization goal to minimize the total travel time of unmanned ships passing through the path. We propose a new reward function, which considers the environment and control delay of unmanned ships at the same time, which can reduce the coordination time between unmanned ships at the same time. In the simulation experiment, through the quantitative and qualitative results of deep reinforcement learning of unmanned ship navigation and path angle waiting, the effectiveness of our solution is verified.