arXiv Machine Learning

Satellite Trajectory Optimization via Proximal Policy Optimization for Space Debris Avoidance

arXiv:2608. 09628v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Collision avoidance systems are commonly used to avoid fragmentation events occurring in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) and Geosynchronous Equatorial Orbit (GEO).

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 16

Neural Operator Learning for Collision-Aware Trajectory Planning of Spacecraft Swarms

The paper presents a permutation‑equivariant neural operator that learns to generate collision‑free, fuel‑efficient trajectories for spacecraft swarms by mapping distributions of initial and target states, as well as obstacle states, to trajectory outputs. The operator is self‑supervised and, when paired with a batched Gauss‑Newton step, enforces exact orbital dynamics and further reduces fuel consumption. Trained on ten spacecraft, the model generalizes zero‑shot to swarms of 1,000 spacecraft and 11,000 obstacles, achieving accuracy comparable to a per‑agent optimal control solver while maintaining collision avoidance.

By Sidhdharth D. Sikka, Suyi Gao, Zehui Lu, Rongjie Lai, Shaoshuai Mou
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 4

Neural operator learning for collision-aware trajectory planning of spacecraft swarms

arXiv:2608. 00320v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Autonomous spacecraft swarms must plan fuel-efficient, collision-free maneuvers in increasingly congested orbits, yet classical trajectory optimization scales poorly as pairwise safety constraints multiply with swarm size, and learning-based planners rarely transfer across swarm sizes or debris densities.

By Sidhdharth D. Sikka, Suyi Gao, Zehui Lu, Rongjie Lai, Shaoshuai Mou
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Reachability-Informed Reinforcement Learning for Multi-Impulse Interplanetary Transfers

The paper introduces Reachability Analysis-Informed Reinforcement Learning (RARL) for designing deterministic multi‑impulse interplanetary transfers. RARL uses local first‑order reachability maps to bound velocity perturbations and selects intermediate waypoints, which are then translated into maneuvers via Lambert reconstruction and a terminal two‑impulse solution. Numerical experiments on an Earth‑Mars benchmark show that RARL achieves a mean maneuver cost only 1.72% above a validated convex programming reference and can be trained once to handle a wide range of departure states, achieving 100% feasibility on 10,000 held‑out Monte Carlo departures.

By Yashdeep Chaudhary, Roberto Armellin, Harry Holt
arXiv AI
Sep 15

Chance-Constrained Belief-Space Maneuver Planning for Autonomous Collision Avoidance Under Uncertainty

The paper presents a chance-constrained belief-space planning framework for autonomous collision avoidance in low Earth orbit. It models uncertain orbital states as Gaussian beliefs and uses a Monte Carlo tree search to decide whether to wait for better tracking data or to execute a maneuver before the time of closest approach. Experiments on 96 scenarios from NASA’s dataset show that the planner can avoid maneuvers in about 40% of cases while keeping collision risk below the threshold, with performance heavily dependent on tracking quality and cadence.

By Grace Ra Kim, Duncan Eddy, Mykel J. Kochenderfer
arXiv AI
Jul 15

TerraZero: Procedural Driving Simulation for Zero-Demonstration Self-Play at Scale

arXiv:2607. 13028v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Training robust autonomous driving agents requires a simulator that is fast enough for reinforcement learning at scale, realistic enough to ground behavior in real-world map structure, and diverse enough to cover the safety-critical long tail that logged data rarely contains.

By Zhouchonghao Wu, Akshay Rangesh, Weixin Li, Wei-Jer Chang, Zachary Lee, Tim Wang, Wei Zhan
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Reward-Free Continual Adaptation for Resilient Space Robots

The paper presents a reward‑free continual learning framework for space robots that uses latent‑state world models to adapt to severe hardware degradation. By pre‑training a model‑based agent in diverse simulations, the world model learns to predict reward structure in latent space. During deployment, the observation encoder and reward predictor are frozen while only the transition dynamics are updated via unsupervised rollouts, allowing the policy to adapt using imagined trajectories without new rewards.

By Andrej Orsula, Miguel Olivares-Mendez, Carol Martinez
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 28

Diffusion Policies for Short-Horizon Planning in Robot Crowd Navigation

The paper introduces Planning Diffusion Policy Optimization (PDPO), an offline‑to‑online reinforcement‑learning framework that employs a diffusion policy to produce short‑horizon action chunks for robot crowd navigation. PDPO is pretrained on collision‑avoidance demonstrations and fine‑tuned online with PPO, generating five‑step action sequences applied in a receding‑horizon manner. The authors also identify a benchmark artifact where agents can leave the valid domain without explicit boundary constraints, and they mitigate this by treating boundary violations as collisions, leading to improved success rates over strong baselines.

By Wendong Li, Jochen Garcke
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

Act More, Decide Less: Skill-Guided Adaptive Action Chunking for Long-Horizon LLM Agents

The paper introduces SPACE, a method for enabling large language model agents to emit variable-length action chunks in long-horizon tasks. By distilling chunk-boundary supervision from programmatic skills derived from successful trajectories, SPACE overcomes the tendency of agents to either act one step at a time or commit to overly long sequences. Experiments on ALFWorld and ScienceWorld demonstrate that SPACE raises success rates by 7.0%–31.3% and cuts LLM decision rounds by up to 78.9%.

By Yanting Yang, Can Jin, Jinman Zhao, Jiahao Wu, Yang Zhou, Zhepeng Wang, Zhendong Wang, Mu Zhou, Dimitris N. Metaxas