Khalasi: Energy-Efficient Navigation for Surface Vehicles in Vortical Flow Fields

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Gadhvi, Rushiraj, Manjanna, Sandeep
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Gadhvi, Rushiraj
Manjanna, Sandeep
author_facet Gadhvi, Rushiraj
Manjanna, Sandeep
contents For centuries, khalasi (Gujarati for sailor) have skillfully harnessed ocean currents to navigate vast waters with minimal effort. Emulating this intuition in autonomous systems remains a significant challenge, particularly for Autonomous Surface Vehicles tasked with long duration missions under strict energy budgets. In this work, we present a learning-based approach for energy-efficient surface vehicle navigation in vortical flow fields, where partial observability often undermines traditional path-planning methods. We present an end to end reinforcement learning framework based on Soft Actor Critic that learns flow-aware navigation policies using only local velocity measurements. Through extensive evaluation across diverse and dynamically rich scenarios, our method demonstrates substantial energy savings and robust generalization to previously unseen flow conditions, offering a promising path toward long term autonomy in ocean environments. The navigation paths generated by our proposed approach show an improvement in energy conservation 30 to 50 percent compared to the existing state of the art techniques.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2512_06912
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Khalasi: Energy-Efficient Navigation for Surface Vehicles in Vortical Flow Fields
Gadhvi, Rushiraj
Manjanna, Sandeep
Robotics
Machine Learning
For centuries, khalasi (Gujarati for sailor) have skillfully harnessed ocean currents to navigate vast waters with minimal effort. Emulating this intuition in autonomous systems remains a significant challenge, particularly for Autonomous Surface Vehicles tasked with long duration missions under strict energy budgets. In this work, we present a learning-based approach for energy-efficient surface vehicle navigation in vortical flow fields, where partial observability often undermines traditional path-planning methods. We present an end to end reinforcement learning framework based on Soft Actor Critic that learns flow-aware navigation policies using only local velocity measurements. Through extensive evaluation across diverse and dynamically rich scenarios, our method demonstrates substantial energy savings and robust generalization to previously unseen flow conditions, offering a promising path toward long term autonomy in ocean environments. The navigation paths generated by our proposed approach show an improvement in energy conservation 30 to 50 percent compared to the existing state of the art techniques.
title Khalasi: Energy-Efficient Navigation for Surface Vehicles in Vortical Flow Fields
topic Robotics
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.06912