Autonomous surface vehicles (ASVs) are widely employed in various marine industrial tasks. Regardless of the specific operation, one common process is docking, particularly the ASV's return to port. Therefore, the docking process is crucial to ASV operations in industrial applications. Docking space perception (DSP) provides essential environmental information, such as the docking space, driving space, and the shore. However, only a few studies have utilized marks for cooperative docking space perception, and no research has explored noncooperative perception. This article proposes a novel docking space bird's eye view (DSBEV) network to segment docking space on the bird's eye view (BEV) plane for the DSP task. DSBEV does not require any marks and can operate directly in port environments. DSBEV network includes an undistortion-splat module and an attention-water module, designed to enhance the DSP performance. A new watershore loss is introduced to generate the docking space utilizing the shape information. Due to the lack of the docking perception dataset, we construct a water surface platform to create a docking space dataset. The experimental results demonstrate that our DSBEV network achieved an average IoU of 76.8%, attaining state-of-the-art performance. Module analyses and ablation studies are conducted to validate the effectiveness of our designed modules.

Moving object segmentation (MOS) and Ego velocity estimation (EVE) are vital capabilities for mobile systems to achieve full autonomy. Several approaches have attempted to achieve MOSEVE using a LiDAR sensor. However, LiDAR sensors are typically expensive and susceptible to adverse weather conditions. Instead, millimeter-wave radar (MWR) has gained popularity in robotics and autonomous driving for real applications due to its cost-effectiveness and resilience to bad weather. Nonetheless, publicly available MOSEVE datasets and approaches using radar data are limited. Some existing methods adopt point convolutional networks from LiDAR-based approaches, ignoring the specific artifacts and the valuable radial velocity information of radar measurements, leading to suboptimal performance. In this paper, we propose a novel transformer network that effectively addresses the sparsity and noise issues and leverages the radial velocity measurements of radar points using our devised radar self- and cross-attention mechanisms. Based on that, our method achieves accurate EVE of the robot and performs MOS using only radar data simultaneously. To thoroughly evaluate the MOSEVE performance of our method, we annotated the radar points in the public View-of-Delft (VoD) dataset and additionally constructed a new radar dataset in various environments. The experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our approach over existing state-of-the-art methods. The code is available at https://github.com/ORCAUboat/RadarMOSEVE.

Marine debris is severely threatening the marine lives and causing sustained pollution to the whole ecosystem. To prevent the wastes from getting into the ocean, it is helpful to clean up the floating wastes in inland waters using the autonomous cleaning devices like unmanned surface vehicles. The cleaning efficiency relies on a high-accurate and robust object detection system. However, the small size of the target, the strong light reflection over water surface, and the reflection of other objects on bank-side all bring challenges to the vision-based object detection system. To promote the practical application for autonomous floating wastes cleaning, we present FloW†, the first dataset for floating waste detection in inland water areas. The dataset consists of an image sub-dataset FloW-Img and a multimodal sub-dataset FloW-RI which contains synchronized millimeter wave radar data and images. Accurate annotations for images and radar data are provided, supporting floating waste detection strategies based on image, radar data, and the fusion of two sensors. We perform several baseline experiments on our dataset, including vision-based and radar-based detection methods. The results show that, the detection accuracy is relatively low and floating waste detection still remains a challenging task.