Reliability-aware short-term roll prediction for unmanned surface vehicles via multi-task learning and adaptive centralization

Abstract

Reliable roll prediction of unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) is essential for ensuring navi?gational safety and enhancing autonomous decision-making. While existing studies primarily focus on improving prediction accuracy, the quantification of prediction reliability remains insufficiently addressed. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes a reliability-aware prediction paradigm that integrates confidence assessment into the predictive pipeline. The architecture utilizes a multi-task learning structure where a shared feature extraction backbone feeds into dual heads: a regression head for precise roll prediction and a quantification head for confidence scoring. This configuration provides accurate prediction and corresponding confidence for risk?sensitive downstream tasks. In addition, an adaptive centralization strategy tailored for short?term real-time roll prediction is introduced to improve model generalization under varying operational conditions. Experiments conducted on a real-sea dataset demonstrate that the proposed method effectively quantifies the reliability of prediction results and maintains superior generalization under varying conditions, offering significant potential for practical engineering applications.