Active Tracking of Marine Pollution Sources: An Uncertainty-Aware Categorical Bayesian Framework for Unmanned Surface Vehicles

arXiv:2509.20593v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This paper presents an uncertainty-aware framework for the active tracking of marine pollution sources using Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs). The proposed framework employs an Informative Path Planning (IPP) strategy driven by Bayesian inference, modelling the belief of source location as a categorical distribution. This work presents a high-fidelity simulation pipeline, coupling Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for realistic pollutant dispersion with Gazebo-based hydrodynamics and ArduPilot for USV control. Furthermore, this paper introduces the Smallest Credible Interval (SCI) as a metric to quantify estimation uncertainty and to serve as an autonomous termination criterion. Extensive simulations across diverse wave conditions and source locations demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves a 95.8% success rate, significantly outperforming baseline methods in both localisation accuracy and environmental adaptability. This framework provides a scalable and ROS-compatible foundation for fully autonomous environmental monitoring and rapid incident response.

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