# IoT-Enabled Autonomous Maritime Navigation in Smart Ports: A Curriculum-Guided Shared Policy Learning Framework

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11597 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.11597/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 54 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Maximum Entropy Deep Reinforcement Learning with a Stochastic Actor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1801.01290/) (2018)
- [Continuous control with deep reinforcement learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1509.02971/) (2015)
- [Domain Randomization for Transferring Deep Neural Networks from Simulation to the Real World](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.06907/) (2017)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Driving: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.00444/) (2020)
- [Sim-to-Real Transfer of Robotic Control with Dynamics Randomization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1710.06537/) (2017)
- [Learning to Communicate with Deep Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1605.06676/) (2016)
- [Curriculum Learning for Reinforcement Learning Domains: A Framework and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2003.04960/) (2020)
- [Teacher-Student Curriculum Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.00183/) (2017)
- [Reverse Curriculum Generation for Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.05300/) (2017)
- [SMARTS: Scalable Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Training School for Autonomous Driving](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.09776/) (2020)
- [A Survey of Multi-Agent Deep Reinforcement Learning with Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.08975/) (2022)
- [Distributional Soft Actor-Critic: Off-Policy Reinforcement Learning for Addressing Value Estimation Errors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.02811/) (2020)
- [Edge Robotics: Edge-Computing-Accelerated Multi-Robot Simultaneous Localization and Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.13222/) (2021)
- [Deep Reinforcement Learning Controller for 3D Path-following and Collision Avoidance by Autonomous Underwater Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.09792/) (2020)
- [Distributional Reinforcement Learning based Integrated Decision Making and Control for Autonomous Surface Vehicles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.09466/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As smart port infrastructures increasingly rely on autonomous maritime devices enabled by the Internet of Things (IoT), ensuring reliable onboard navigation intelligence has become a critical challenge for safe and scalable operations in congested waterways. This paper investigates onboard autonomous navigation for such IoT devices under partial observability and dense traffic conditions. A curriculum-guided reinforcement learning framework with a shared recurrent policy is developed to enhance temporal reasoning, deployment scalability, and robustness of edge-level decision-making. Centralized training is adopted as an offline design-time strategy, while all navigation actions are executed fully onboard, consistent with IoT edge intelligence paradigms. Extensive simulations in multiple realistic port environments demonstrate that the proposed approach improves navigation reliability, collision avoidance, and training stability compared with standard baseline methods, and generalizes effectively to previously unseen high-density scenarios. The results indicate that curriculum-guided shared learning provides a practical solution for scalable deployment of IoT-enabled autonomous maritime devices in smart port operations.