arXiv AI

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.

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 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
Sep 14

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.

By Allan Minh-Tam Nguyen, Sree Showrya Kotala, Stefan Banioi-Crijman, Kurt Driessens, Rico M\"ockel
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 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 Machine Learning
Aug 17

CORAL: Curriculum-Optimized Reward Adaptation for LiDAR-Based Goal-Directed Urban Driving

arXiv:2608. 14332v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning is promising for autonomous urban driving, but long-horizon goal-directed navigation asks a policy to acquire several competing behaviors at once--reaching a distant goal, tracking a route, avoiding obstacles, obeying signals--and a fixed objective gives no order in which to learn them.

By Anisa Saleem, Duksu Kim
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 7

Optimality-Informed Neural Networks for Lunar Landing Trajectory Optimization

arXiv:2607. 02741v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: This paper develops an Optimality-Informed Neural Network (OINN) approach for the energy-optimal, free-final-time powered descent of a lunar lander from any initial position, velocity, and mass within a bounded operating envelope to a fixed landing site with zero terminal velocity.

By Zhenbo Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Learning Acrobatic Flight from Preferences

The paper introduces Reward Ensemble under Confidence (REC), a probabilistic reward learning framework for preference-based reinforcement learning that models per‑timestep reward uncertainty using an ensemble of distributional reward models. REC incorporates uncertainty into the preference loss and uses model disagreement to drive exploration, achieving 88.4% of shaped‑reward performance on acrobatic quadrotor control versus 55.2% with standard Preference PPO. The authors train policies in simulation and transfer them zero‑shot to real quadrotors, demonstrating complex acrobatic maneuvers learned solely from human preference feedback, and validate REC on a continuous‑control benchmark.

By Colin Merk, Ismail Geles, Jiaxu Xing, Angel Romero, Giorgia Ramponi, Davide Scaramuzza
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