Identifying Optimal Launch Sites of High-Altitude Latex-Balloons using Bayesian Optimisation for the Task of Station-Keeping
Abstract
Station-keeping tasks for high-altitude balloons show promise in areas such as ecological surveys, atmospheric analysis, and communication relays. However, identifying the optimal time and position to launch a latex high-altitude balloon is still a challenging and multifaceted problem. For example, tasks such as forest fire tracking place geometric constraints on the launch location of the balloon. Furthermore, identifying the most optimal location also heavily depends on atmospheric conditions. We first illustrate how reinforcement learning-based controllers, frequently used for station-keeping tasks, can exploit the environment. This exploitation can degrade performance on unseen weather patterns and affect station-keeping performance when identifying an optimal launch configuration. Valuing all states equally in the region, the agent exploits the region's geometry by flying near the edge, leading to risky behaviours. We propose a modification which compensates for this exploitation and finds this leads to, on average, higher steps within the target region on unseen data. Then, we illustrate how Bayesian Optimisation (BO) can identify the optimal launch location to perform station-keeping tasks, maximising the expected undiscounted return from a given rollout. We show BO can find this launch location in fewer steps compared to other optimisation methods. Results indicate that, surprisingly, the most optimal location to launch from is not commonly within the target region.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2403.10784
Video Coming soon.
Fig Caption: Block diagram of our method to identify the optimal launch configuration (latitude, longitude, and time-offset).
Fig Caption: Tanh reward function incentivises the agent to fly closer to the target region, reducing reward hacking from flying around the circumference.
Fig Caption: Optimal Launch configurations across two different wind field dates for both Bayesian Optimisation and Particle Swarm Optimisation.
Cite us:
@article{saunders2024identifying,
title={Identifying Optimal Launch Sites of High-Altitude Latex-Balloons using Bayesian Optimisation for the Task of Station-Keeping},
author={Saunders, Jack and Saeedi, Sajad and Hartshorne, Adam and Xu, Binbin and {\c{S}}im{\c{s}}ek, {\"O}zgur and Hunter, Alan and Li, Wenbin},
journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.10784},
year={2024}
}