Candidate: Rodrigue De Schaetzen
Time: 1:00pm
Location: Online - contact the candidate for details.
Supervisor: Professor Stephen Smith
Abstract:
We present a framework for autonomous navigation of ships operating in ice fields. Trajectories are computed in a receding-horizon manner, where we frequently perform planning updates given updated ice-field data. During a planning iteration, we simplify the trajectory planning problem by assuming a fixed nominal speed that is safe with respect to the current ice conditions, and compute a smooth reference path that minimizes a collision cost. We formulate a novel cost function that minimizes the kinetic energy loss of the ship from ship-ice collisions and incorporate this cost as part of our lattice-based path planner. Solutions computed by the lattice planning stage are then used as an initial guess in our proposed optimization-based improvement step to compute a locally optimal path. We conducted extensive experiments to validate our approach both in simulation and in a physical test-bed managed by the National Research Council Canada (NRC).
All are welcome!