Reinforcement Meta-Learning for Interception of Maneuvering Exoatmospheric Targets with Parasitic Attitude Loop
This addresses the challenge of reliable interception in space for defense applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods with adaptations for specific parasitic effects.
The paper tackled the problem of exoatmospheric interception of maneuvering targets by using Reinforcement Meta-Learning to optimize an adaptive guidance, navigation, and control system, demonstrating through simulations that it achieves performance close to augmented proportional navigation with perfect state knowledge while handling various parasitic effects.
We use Reinforcement Meta-Learning to optimize an adaptive integrated guidance, navigation, and control system suitable for exoatmospheric interception of a maneuvering target. The system maps observations consisting of strapdown seeker angles and rate gyro measurements directly to thruster on-off commands. Using a high fidelity six degree-of-freedom simulator, we demonstrate that the optimized policy can adapt to parasitic effects including seeker angle measurement lag, thruster control lag, the parasitic attitude loop resulting from scale factor errors and Gaussian noise on angle and rotational velocity measurements, and a time varying center of mass caused by fuel consumption and slosh. Importantly, the optimized policy gives good performance over a wide range of challenging target maneuvers. Unlike previous work that enhances range observability by inducing line of sight oscillations, our system is optimized to use only measurements available from the seeker and rate gyros. Through extensive Monte Carlo simulation of randomized exoatmospheric interception scenarios, we demonstrate that the optimized policy gives performance close to that of augmented proportional navigation with perfect knowledge of the full engagement state. The optimized system is computationally efficient and requires minimal memory, and should be compatible with today's flight processors.