Probabilistic Ship Trajectory Forecasting using Transformer Models on AIS Data

Anticipation of vessel trajectories is an essential task when navigating at sea. This applies to both human navigators and autonomous surface vessels. Trajectory forecasting enables sub-routines such as collision avoidance to assess the situation and react accordingly in time. This paper investigates Transformer and Performer models for trajectory prediction of surface vessels in confined waters. Using widely available position data from the Automatic Identification System (AIS), candidate models are trained and evaluated. Historical information on how other vessels have moved in the local area surrounding each agent is conveyed using positional heat maps. The heat maps are generated using Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) and encoded with a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) before entering the Transformer models. The models are trained with quantile loss to efficiently obtain a model-aware prediction interval, as this is crucial for timely collision avoidance. The proposed model architectures are shown to greatly outperform previous work while the inclusion of local heat maps enables the prediction of vessel movement that is not otherwise indicated from the previous positions.