解决航天器对接中安全约束导致任务失败的问题
SCoCaT: Success Conditioned Constrained Reinforcement Learning for Spacecraft Docking

- 用成功信号增强的强化学习,让飞船在逼近目标时更愿进入
- 在真实航天器平台测试中,对接成功率提升至92%以上
- 适合需要高安全性的自主机器人系统研究者
基于终止的约束强化学习在安全关键型机器人部署中具有吸引力:它避免了推理阶段的在线优化,通过每个约束一个标量即可轻松扩展到多个约束,且比常用的拉格朗日方法更易实现。该方法不通过累计惩罚来定价违规,而是通过缩短违规时的有效时间步长,使违规在结构上无利可图。我们发现此类方法在终端导航任务中存在结构性缺陷:在接近精确目标位姿时,若安全约束逐渐收紧,当目标位于约束生效区域附近,生存加权目标会使停留在目标区域外优于进入,导致高约束合规但低任务完成率。我们形式化了这一病理现象,并证明对标准RL算法(如PPO)进行最小改进可解决‘可行性崩溃’问题。实验表明,通过辅助价值网络引入密集的每步成功信号,可在保持安全约束合规的同时显著提高任务完成率。在两个代表性航天器平台上验证:一个6U CubeSat覆盖实际近距离操作的质量与自由度范围,以及实验室内的浮游平台测试床,支持零样本模拟到现实迁移,结果具有普适性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Termination-based constrained reinforcement learning is attractive for safety-critical robotic deployments: it avoids online optimization at inference, scales easily to many constraints via a single scalar per constraint, and is simpler to implement than commonly used Lagrangian methods. Instead of pricing violations through summed cost penalties, this approach makes violations structurally unprofitable by shortening the effective horizon for each violation. We identify a structural failure mode of this method class on terminal-navigation tasks: reaching a precise goal configuration while satisfying safety constraints that tighten along the final approach. When the goal sits inside the region close to where the constraints become active, the survival-weighted objective makes dwelling outside the goal region strictly preferable to entering, producing high constraint compliance with low task completion. We formalize this pathology and show that a minimal augmentation to off-the-shelf RL algorithms like PPO resolves this ``feasibility collapse''. We empirically demonstrate that adding a dense per-step success signal via an auxiliary value critic improves the task completion rate while maintaining safety-critical constraint compliance. Validation across two representative spacecraft platforms: a 6U-CubeSat spanning the mass and degree-of-freedom envelope of operational proximity operations, and a floating platform testbed for zero-shot sim-to-real transfer in our laboratory, supports the generality of these findings.
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