The paper presents a curriculum‑based adversarial heterogeneous agent reinforcement learning (HARL‑AC) approach for autonomous quad‑copter landing on a ship deck in maritime settings. Using Heterogeneous‑Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (HAPPO) in NVIDIA Isaac Lab, the authors train a cooperative control policy that outperforms domain‑randomized baselines, achieving up to 97.5% success on in‑distribution sea states and higher median success and lower crash rates on out‑of‑distribution sea states. The adversarially trained policy also exhibits more cautious behavior, slightly increasing timeouts but improving safety in severe, unseen conditions.
By Allan Minh-Tam Nguyen, Sree Showrya Kotala, Stefan Banioi-Crijman, Kurt Driessens, Rico M\"ockel
arXiv:2506. 22174v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The transport industry has recently shown significant interest in unmanned surface vehicles (USVs), specifically for port and inland waterway transport.
By Bavo Lesy, Siemen Herremans, Robin Kerstens, Jan Steckel, Walter Daems, Siegfried Mercelis, Ali Anwar
The paper introduces a curriculum-driven deep reinforcement learning framework for autonomous far-range rocket landing. It uses a three-stage curriculum, critic warm‑up, rehearsal to avoid catastrophic forgetting, and a high‑dimensional observation vector with a full 3×3 rotation matrix. The redesigned reward function bounds per‑step rewards and accumulates progress, yielding a 99.98% success rate over 100,000 episodes, far surpassing the baseline.
By Atin Chowdhury, Piyush Joshi
Vision-based heading prediction is useful for UAV--UGV cooperation, but accurate prediction alone does not guarantee that every predicted heading should be issued directly as a control command. This paper investigates the decision problem of when and how a fixed vision-based heading predictor should be trusted for command issuance.
arXiv:2606. 19176v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Autonomous UAV operations on ships require reliable vision-based relative pose estimation, yet at-sea validation is costly, weather-dependent, and risky.
By Maneesha Wickramasuriya, Beomyeol Yu, Jaden Shin, Mason Huslig, Taeyoung Lee, Murray Snyder
Aerial image-goal navigation requires an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to reach a target location specified by a goal image. Existing world-model-based methods rank candidate trajectories using predicted futures, but typically rely on only one or a few point predictions, which is inadequate for large-scale outdoor environments with substantial future-state uncertainty.