JaeHyun Chung

Gyu Seon Kim, JaeHyun Chung, Soohyun Park

The advent of reusable rockets has heralded a new era in space exploration, reducing the costs of launching satellites by a significant factor. Traditional rockets were disposable, but the design of reusable rockets for repeated use has revolutionized the financial dynamics of space missions. The most critical phase of reusable rockets is the landing stage, which involves managing the tremendous speed and attitude for safe recovery. The complexity of this task presents new challenges for control systems, specifically in terms of precision and adaptability. Classical control systems like the proportional-integral-derivative (PID) controller lack the flexibility to adapt to dynamic system changes, making them costly and time-consuming to redesign of controller. This paper explores the integration of quantum reinforcement learning into the control systems of reusable rockets as a promising alternative. Unlike classical reinforcement learning, quantum reinforcement learning uses quantum bits that can exist in superposition, allowing for more efficient information encoding and reducing the number of parameters required. This leads to increased computational efficiency, reduced memory requirements, and more stable and predictable performance. Due to the nature of reusable rockets, which must be light, heavy computers cannot fit into them. In the reusable rocket scenario, quantum reinforcement learning, which has reduced memory requirements due to fewer parameters, is a good solution.

Gyu Seon Kim, Yeryeong Cho, Jaehyun Chung et al.

Achieving global space-air-ground integrated network (SAGIN) access only with CubeSats presents significant challenges such as the access sustainability limitations in specific regions (e.g., polar regions) and the energy efficiency limitations in CubeSats. To tackle these problems, high-altitude long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles (HALE-UAVs) can complement these CubeSat shortcomings for providing cooperatively global access sustainability and energy efficiency. However, as the number of CubeSats and HALE-UAVs, increases, the scheduling dimension of each ground station (GS) increases. As a result, each GS can fall into the curse of dimensionality, and this challenge becomes one major hurdle for efficient global access. Therefore, this paper provides a quantum multi-agent reinforcement Learning (QMARL)-based method for scheduling between GSs and CubeSats/HALE-UAVs in order to improve global access availability and energy efficiency. The main reason why the QMARL-based scheduler can be beneficial is that the algorithm facilitates a logarithmic-scale reduction in scheduling action dimensions, which is one critical feature as the number of CubeSats and HALE-UAVs expands. Additionally, individual GSs have different traffic demands depending on their locations and characteristics, thus it is essential to provide differentiated access services. The superiority of the proposed scheduler is validated through data-intensive experiments in realistic CubeSat/HALE-UAV settings.