2024/06/17 by Kyle Dunlap, Dunlap, Kyle, Kochise Bennett +7
Engineering · #FOS: Electrical engineering #Industrial Vision Systems and Defect Detection #Manufacturing Process and Optimization #Robot Manipulation and Learning #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2406.11795
openalex publication_date 2024/06/17 · openalex created_date 2024/06/19 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
The trial and error approach of reinforcement learning (RL) results in high performance across many complex tasks, but it can also lead to unsafe behavior. Run time assurance (RTA) approaches can be used to assure safety of the agent during training, allowing it to safely explore the environment. This paper investigates the application of RTA during RL training for a 6-Degree-of-Freedom spacecraft inspection task, where the agent must control its translational motion and attitude to inspect a passive chief spacecraft. Several safety constraints are developed based on position, velocity, attitude, temperature, and power of the spacecraft, and are all enforced simultaneously during training through the use of control barrier functions. This paper also explores simulating the RL agent and RTA at different frequencies to best balance training performance and safety assurance. The agent is trained with and without RTA, and the performance is compared across several metrics including inspection percentage and fuel usage.