Mitigating Data Scarcity in Spaceflight Applications for Offline Reinforcement Learning Using Physics-Informed Deep Generative Models

The deployment of reinforcement learning (RL)-based controllers on physical systems is often limited by poor generalization to real-world scenarios, known as the simulation-to-reality (sim-to-real) gap. This gap is particularly challenging in spaceflight, where real-world training data are scarce due to high cost and limited planetary exploration data. Traditional approaches, such as system identification and synthetic data generation, depend on sufficient data and often fail due to modeling assumptions or lack of physics-based constraints. We propose addressing this data scarcity by introducing physics-based learning bias in a generative model. Specifically, we develop the Mutual Information-based Split Variational Autoencoder (MI-VAE), a physics-informed VAE that learns differences between observed system trajectories and those predicted by physics-based models. The latent space of the MI-VAE enables generation of synthetic datasets that respect physical constraints. We evaluate MI-VAE on a planetary lander problem, focusing on limited real-world data and offline RL training. Results show that augmenting datasets with MI-VAE samples significantly improves downstream RL performance, outperforming standard VAEs in statistical fidelity, sample diversity, and policy success rate. This work demonstrates a scalable strategy for enhancing autonomous controller robustness in complex, data-constrained environments.

Synthetic Data Generation for Minimum-Exposure Navigation in a Time-Varying Environment using Generative AI Models

We study the problem of synthetic generation of samples of environmental features for autonomous vehicle navigation. These features are described by a spatiotemporally varying scalar field that we refer to as a threat field. The threat field is known to have some underlying dynamics subject to process noise. Some "real-world" data of observations of various threat fields are also available. The assumption is that the volume of ``real-world'' data is relatively small. The objective is to synthesize samples that are statistically similar to the data. The proposed solution is a generative artificial intelligence model that we refer to as a split variational recurrent neural network (S-VRNN). The S-VRNN merges the capabilities of a variational autoencoder, which is a widely used generative model, and a recurrent neural network, which is used to learn temporal dependencies in data. The main innovation in this work is that we split the latent space of the S-VRNN into two subspaces. The latent variables in one subspace are learned using the ``real-world'' data, whereas those in the other subspace are learned using the data as well as the known underlying system dynamics. Through numerical experiments we demonstrate that the proposed S-VRNN can synthesize data that are statistically similar to the training data even in the case of very small volume of ``real-world'' training data.