arXiv AI

Deep Learning Warm Starts for Trajectory Optimization on the International Space Station

The paper reports the first in‑space demonstration of using machine learning‑based warm starts to accelerate trajectory optimization for the Astrobee free‑flying robot on the International Space Station. A neural network is trained to learn the structure of the trajectory generation problem solved by sequential convex programming, and onboard predictions reduce solver iterations by 60% for rotational dynamics and 50% for obstacle‑laden scenarios. This approach enables real‑time trajectory planning while respecting safety constraints on limited flight hardware.

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 AI
5d ago

Curriculum-Driven Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Far-Range Rocket Landing

The paper introduces a curriculum-driven deep reinforcement learning framework for autonomous far-range rocket landing. It uses a three-stage curriculum, critic warm‑up, rehearsal to avoid catastrophic forgetting, and a high‑dimensional observation vector with a full 3×3 rotation matrix. The redesigned reward function bounds per‑step rewards and accumulates progress, yielding a 99.98% success rate over 100,000 episodes, far surpassing the baseline.

By Atin Chowdhury, Piyush Joshi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 1

Deep Reinforcement Learning for Spacecraft Attitude Control During Atmospheric Re-Entry

arXiv:2606. 31291v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Deep reinforcement learning has the potential to solve attitude control problems more adaptively, precisely, and robustly by handling nonlinear dynamics, uncertainties, and failure cases more effectively than traditional attitude control approaches.

By Alexander Fabisch, Melvin Laux, Mariela De Lucas \'Alvarez, Edoardo Caroselli, Julian Theis
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Hybrid Reinforcement Learning and Search for Flight Trajectory Planning

The paper investigates combining Reinforcement Learning (RL) with search-based path planners to accelerate flight trajectory optimization for airliners. An RL agent is trained to generate near‑optimal paths from location and atmospheric data, which then constrain a traditional solver to reduce its search space. Experiments using Airbus performance models show that fuel consumption deviates by less than 1% from an unconstrained solver while computation time improves by up to 50%.

By Alberto Luise, Michele Lombardi
arXiv AI
Sep 17

CALOS: Control-Affine Lyapunov On-manifold Safety Layer for Safe Deep Reinforcement Learning for Quadrotors

CALOS is a runtime safety layer for quadrotor control that enforces attitude constraints without altering the underlying deep reinforcement learning algorithm. It formulates tilt-angle inequalities and a Lyapunov descent condition into a single quadratic program, solved exactly via active-set enumeration over a three-dimensional torque space. In NVIDIA Isaac Lab trajectory-tracking tasks, CALOS reduces lateral tracking error by 55‑60% compared to an unconstrained Proximal Policy Optimization baseline and eliminates attitude-constraint violations during training.

By Fabrizio Cesareo, Sebastiano Mengozzi, Nicola Mimmo, Andrea Acquaviva