OrbitZoo: Real Orbital Systems Challenges for Reinforcement Learning
This addresses the need for realistic simulations in space operations for satellite operators and researchers, though it is incremental as it builds on existing RL frameworks with improved accuracy.
The paper tackles the problem of space congestion by introducing OrbitZoo, a high-fidelity multi-agent RL environment for orbital systems, which achieves a 0.16% MAPE error when validated against real Starlink data.
The increasing number of satellites and orbital debris has made space congestion a critical issue, threatening satellite safety and sustainability. Challenges such as collision avoidance, station-keeping, and orbital maneuvering require advanced techniques to handle dynamic uncertainties and multi-agent interactions. Reinforcement learning (RL) has shown promise in this domain, enabling adaptive, autonomous policies for space operations; however, many existing RL frameworks rely on custom-built environments developed from scratch, which often use simplified models and require significant time to implement and validate the orbital dynamics, limiting their ability to fully capture real-world complexities. To address this, we introduce OrbitZoo, a versatile multi-agent RL environment built on a high-fidelity industry standard library, that enables realistic data generation, supports scenarios like collision avoidance and cooperative maneuvers, and ensures robust and accurate orbital dynamics. The environment is validated against a real satellite constellation, Starlink, achieving a Mean Absolute Percentage Error (MAPE) of 0.16% compared to real-world data. This validation ensures reliability for generating high-fidelity simulations and enabling autonomous and independent satellite operations.