Deep reinforcement learning agents for autonomous satellite attitude control and orbit maintenance, trained using Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC) algorithms with physics-based reward shaping.
for iteration = 1, 2, ... do:
Collect trajectories using policy π_θ
Compute advantages A_t using GAE(λ)
for epoch = 1, ..., K do:
for minibatch in trajectories do:
Compute ratio r_t(θ) = π_θ(a|s) / π_θ_old(a|s)
L_CLIP = min(r_t A_t, clip(r_t, 1-ε, 1+ε) A_t)
Update θ by maximizing L_CLIP - c₁ L_VF + c₂ S[π_θ]
• Input: 12D state (attitude quaternion, angular rates, target)
• Hidden: 256-256-128 neurons (ReLU)
• Output: 3D mean + 3D log_std
• Total Parameters: 127,747
• Input: 12D state
• Hidden: 256-256-128 neurons (ReLU)
• Output: 1D value estimate
• Total Parameters: 98,049
• R = -|e|² - 0.1|ω|² - 0.01|τ|² + bonus
• Pointing error penalized quadratically
• Rate damping for stability
• Control effort minimization
• Stable training with clipped objective
• Good sample efficiency for on-policy
• Handles continuous action spaces well
• Robust to hyperparameter choices
• Maximum entropy for exploration
• Excellent sample efficiency
• Robust final policies
• Automatic temperature tuning
• Guaranteed stability margins
• Well-understood behavior
• Lower computational cost
• Easier certification