Tight Constraint Prediction of Six-Degree-of-Freedom Transformer-based Powered Descent Guidance

TL;DR

This paper presents T-SCvx, a Transformer-based method that predicts tight constraints for 6-DoF powered descent guidance, significantly improving solution efficiency and reliability for real-time onboard trajectory planning.

Contribution

It extends Transformer-based Successive Convexification to 6-DoF guidance, learning tight constraints and feasible trajectories to enhance solution speed and convergence.

Findings

Achieves real-time 6-DoF guidance on Mars landing scenario.

Reduces problem size by predicting active constraints.

Improves convergence reliability and solution quality.

Abstract

This work introduces Transformer-based Successive Convexification (T-SCvx), an extension of Transformer-based Powered Descent Guidance (T-PDG), generalizable for efficient six-degree-of-freedom (DoF) fuel-optimal powered descent trajectory generation. Our approach significantly enhances the sample efficiency and solution quality for nonconvex-powered descent guidance by employing a rotation invariant transformation of the sampled dataset. T-PDG was previously applied to the 3-DoF minimum fuel powered descent guidance problem, improving solution times by up to an order of magnitude compared to lossless convexification (LCvx). By learning to predict the set of tight or active constraints at the optimal control problem's solution, Transformer-based Successive Convexification (T-SCvx) creates the minimal reduced-size problem initialized with only the tight constraints, then uses the solution of this reduced problem to warm-start the direct optimization solver. 6-DoF powered descent guidance is known to be challenging to solve quickly and reliably due to the nonlinear and non-convex nature of the problem, the discretization scheme heavily influencing solution validity, and reference trajectory initialization determining algorithm convergence or divergence. Our contributions in this work address these challenges by extending T-PDG to learn the set of tight constraints for the successive convexification (SCvx) formulation of the 6-DoF powered descent guidance problem. In addition to reducing the problem size, feasible and locally optimal reference trajectories are also learned to facilitate convergence from the initial guess. T-SCvx enables onboard computation of real-time guidance trajectories, demonstrated by a 6-DoF Mars powered landing application problem.