Variational Autoencoder for the Prediction of Oil Contamination Temporal Evolution in Water Environments

The water quality monitoring of large water masses using robotic vehicles is a complex task highly developed in recent years. The main approaches utilize adaptative informative path planning of fleets of autonomous surface vehicles and computer learning methods. However, water monitoring is characterized by a highly dynamic and unknown environment. Thus, the characterization of the water quality state of a water mass becomes a challenge. This paper proposes a variational autoencoder structure, trained in a model-free manner, that aims to provide a dynamic contamination model from partial observations of a homogeneous fleet of autonomous surface vehicles. To train the proposed approach, an oil spillage simulator based on heuristics is provided for world building. The proposed variational autoencoder was tested in three different environments characterized by different oil spill movements and twp different fleets equipped with different sensors. The results show accurate future contamination distribution predictions with a mean squared error ranging from 3 to 9% of the baseline at validation, defined as the static approach. Further tests addressed the overfit of the proposed neural network, showing a high robustness against unseen scenarios, and the effects of the gathered monitoring information in the variational autoencoder performance.