arXiv Machine Learning

Curriculum-Based Adversarial Heterogeneous Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Quad-Copter Landing in Maritime Settings

The paper presents a curriculum‑based adversarial heterogeneous agent reinforcement learning (HARL‑AC) approach for autonomous quad‑copter landing on a ship deck in maritime settings. Using Heterogeneous‑Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (HAPPO) in NVIDIA Isaac Lab, the authors train a cooperative control policy that outperforms domain‑randomized baselines, achieving up to 97.5% success on in‑distribution sea states and higher median success and lower crash rates on out‑of‑distribution sea states. The adversarially trained policy also exhibits more cautious behavior, slightly increasing timeouts but improving safety in severe, unseen conditions.

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 15

Adversarial Reinforcement Learning for Robust Planetary Landing

The paper presents a method for improving the robustness of deep reinforcement learning (DRL) policies used in planetary landing by employing adversarial reinforcement learning. A secondary agent generates physically constrained perturbations that challenge the landing controller, creating an asymmetric zero‑sum game. Training is conducted in three stages—baseline learning, stochastic robustness enhancement, and iterative adversarial optimization—showing that adversarial disturbances uncover vulnerabilities missed by conventional randomization and hint at better generalization to unseen perturbations.

By Miguel Leiva-V\'elez, Nicolas Gaston-Rozado, Andrea Scorsoglio, Hodei Urrutxua, V\'ictor Rodr\'iguez-Fern\'andez
arXiv AI
Aug 25

Robust Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning for Small UAS Separation Assurance under GPS Degradation and Spoofing

The paper presents a robust multi‑agent reinforcement learning framework for small unmanned aircraft systems (sUAS) to maintain separation assurance when GPS data is degraded or spoofed. By modeling state observation corruption as a zero‑sum game, the authors derive a closed‑form adversarial perturbation that eliminates iterative inner optimization and can be evaluated in linear time. Integrating this perturbation into a policy‑gradient MARL algorithm yields a counter‑policy that achieves near‑zero collision rates in high‑density simulations even with up to 35% observation corruption, outperforming non‑adversarial baselines.

By Alex Zongo, Filippos Fotiadis, Ufuk Topcu, Peng Wei
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 3

Wind-Aware Reinforcement Learning Control of a Small Quadrotor Using Learned Onboard Wind Estimation in Simulated Atmospheric Turbulence

arXiv:2607. 01528v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Small multirotor aircraft are increasingly tasked with operations in the atmospheric boundary layer, where turbulent winds comparable to the vehicle's airspeed degrade trajectory tracking and can defeat conventional feedback control.

By Abdullah Al Tasim, Wei Sun
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for Air Combat at DARPA's AlphaDogfight Trials

arXiv:2105. 00990v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Autonomous control in high-dimensional, continuous state spaces is a persistent and important challenge in the fields of robotics and artificial intelligence.

By Adrian P. Pope, Jaime S. Ide, Daria Micovic, Henry Diaz, David Rosenbluth, Lee Ritholtz, Jason C. Twedt, Thayne T. Walker, Kevin Alcedo, Daniel Javorsek
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

BVR Sim: An Open and High-Throughput Environment for Heterogeneous Air-Combat Reinforcement Learning

BVR Sim is an open‑source, Gymnasium‑style environment for heterogeneous air‑combat reinforcement learning, supporting multiple JSBSim aircraft models (F‑15, F‑16, F/A‑18, F‑22) with configurable weapons, sensors, and opponents. It offers a unified tactical action interface, interchangeable Python and accelerated C++ backends, entity‑oriented observations, compositional rewards, scripted opponents, replay and visualization, and adapters for multi‑agent learning frameworks. At a 0.4‑second decision interval, the C++ backend achieves 104 simulated seconds per wall‑clock second in 1‑vs‑1 and remains practical through 10‑vs‑10 scenarios, and a policy trained on the F‑16 transfers to four unseen aircraft with a 45.5% mean win rate after controller adaptation.

By Haocheng Sun (Beijing University of Posts,Telecommunications), Mulai Tan (Air Force Engineering University)
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

Autonomous Aerial Manipulation via Contextual Contrastive Meta Reinforcement Learning

arXiv:2606. 08533v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly being deployed in logistics, service robotics, and other real-world applications, creating a growing demand for autonomous payload acquisition and delivery.

By Lixuan Jin, Bingxuan Lan, Xinyi Bao, Xiangyuan Xie, Chunjie Zhang, Zheng Chen, Tianshuo Liu, Ruijie Tian, Jinyu Ru, Gang Wang, Lei Yuan, Yang Yu
arXiv AI
Aug 11

RecoverFly: A Failure-Aware Reinforcement Learning Post-Training Framework for Aerial Vision-Language Navigation

arXiv:2608. 09467v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicle vision-language navigation (UAV-VLN) requires agents to translate visual observations and language instructions into reliable flight actions in complex environments.

By Boxiong Wang, Hui Kang, Geng Sun, Jiahui Li, Chao Yu, Daxin Tian
arXiv AI
Oct 28

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 AI
Oct 31

Curriculum-Based Deep Reinforcement Learning for Robust Autonomous Rocket Landing under Atmospheric Uncertainty

The paper introduces a curriculum-driven proximal policy optimization framework for three‑dimensional autonomous rocket landing in stochastic atmospheric conditions. Learning is structured into far‑range approach, soft descent, and integrated landing stages, with techniques such as policy transfer, critic warm‑up, rehearsal, and progressive weather severity. In 100,000 evaluation episodes the policy achieved a 96.656% success rate, with performance decreasing to 88.07% under the highest weather‑severity band and small miss distances and low residual velocities at touchdown.

By Atin Chowdhury, Piyush Joshi