Overview
BinoSAILus is an autonomous sailboat navigation system that combines imitation learning and reinforcement learning to enable a vessel agent to reach destinations while avoiding land and adapting to wind conditions.
Approach
- Pretrained a neural policy via behavior cloning from real AIS vessel trajectory data, giving the agent a strong prior over realistic sailing behavior before any environment interaction.
- Fine-tuned the policy using Deep Q-Learning in a simulated sailing environment with wind dynamics and bathymetry constraints.
- The model outputs discrete heading decisions conditioned on position, velocity, wind direction, and goal location — enabling obstacle-aware trajectory planning.