Quantum algorithms applied to satellite mission planning for Earth observation

TL;DR

This paper explores quantum algorithms for satellite mission planning, demonstrating significant improvements over classical methods in task completion rates, and highlights the potential of quantum-enhanced reinforcement learning for complex optimization problems.

Contribution

It introduces quantum algorithms for satellite mission planning and shows their advantage over classical algorithms using real datasets and hybrid quantum-classical methods.

Findings

Quantum algorithms achieved 98.5% task completion rate.

Hybrid quantum-enhanced reinforcement learning outperformed greedy methods.

Potential for quantum solutions in space industry and beyond.

Abstract

Earth imaging satellites are a crucial part of our everyday lives that enable global tracking of industrial activities. Use cases span many applications, from weather forecasting to digital maps, carbon footprint tracking, and vegetation monitoring. However, there are limitations; satellites are difficult to manufacture, expensive to maintain, and tricky to launch into orbit. Therefore, satellites must be employed efficiently. This poses a challenge known as the satellite mission planning problem, which could be computationally prohibitive to solve on large scales. However, close-to-optimal algorithms, such as greedy reinforcement learning and optimization algorithms, can often provide satisfactory resolutions. This paper introduces a set of quantum algorithms to solve the mission planning problem and demonstrate an advantage over the classical algorithms implemented thus far. The problem is formulated as maximizing the number of high-priority tasks completed on real datasets containing thousands of tasks and multiple satellites. This work demonstrates that through solution-chaining and clustering, optimization and machine learning algorithms offer the greatest potential for optimal solutions. This paper notably illustrates that a hybridized quantum-enhanced reinforcement learning agent can achieve a completion percentage of 98.5% over high-priority tasks, significantly improving over the baseline greedy methods with a completion rate of 75.8%. The results presented in this work pave the way to quantum-enabled solutions in the space industry and, more generally, future mission planning problems across industries.