Deep Reinforcement Learning-Based Accurate Control of Planetary Soft Landing

Planetary soft landing has been studied extensively due to its promising application prospects. In this paper, a soft landing control algorithm based on deep reinforcement learning (DRL) with good convergence property is proposed. First, the soft landing problem of the powered descent phase is formulated and the theoretical basis of Reinforcement Learning (RL) used in this paper is introduced. Second, to make it easier to converge, a reward function is designed to include process rewards like velocity tracking reward, solving the problem of sparse reward. Then, by including the fuel consumption penalty and constraints violation penalty, the lander can learn to achieve velocity tracking goal while saving fuel and keeping attitude angle within safe ranges. Then, simulations of training are carried out under the frameworks of Deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG), Twin Delayed DDPG (TD3), and Soft Actor Critic (SAC), respectively, which are of the classical RL frameworks, and all converged. Finally, the trained policy is deployed into velocity tracking and soft landing experiments, results of which demonstrate the validity of the algorithm proposed.