Curriculum-Driven Deep Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Far-Range Rocket Landing

Abstract

Autonomous vertical landing of reusable launch vehicles is a critical yet formidable challenge in aerospace engineering, primarily due to highly nonlinear dynamics, stringent precision require- ments, and inherent environmental uncertainties. While reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising alternative to traditional model-based control, existing approaches frequently rely on flat training paradigms and highly simplified initial conditions, drastically limiting their real-world applicability. This paper proposes a comprehensive curriculum-driven deep reinforcement learning framework designed to master both far-range navigation and precision landing. By employing a three-stage curriculum augmented with a critic warm-up procedure and a rehearsal mechanism to prevent catastrophic forgetting, alongside a high-dimensional observation vector utilizing a full 3 X 3 rotation-matrix, the agent is trained to navigate from an initial horizontal distance of 1,000 to 1,500 units vastly farther than prior benchmarks before executing a soft touchdown. Crucially, we intro- duce a redesigned reward function that reduces unnecessary computational overhead and addresses limitations of earlier formulations, including poorly calibrated reward components and potentially conflicting optimization objectives. The redesigned function bounds the per-step reward magnitude by (O(1)), while its progress term accumulates the total distance closed over the trajectory. The available 100,000-episode results report a 99.98% success rate for the proposed policy and 68.31% for the baseline under the evaluation conditions. In the evaluation, the proposed policy retained 69.1% of its initial fuel capacity and achieved a mean final distance from the pad centre of 7.07 units, compared with 13.10 units for the baseline. Landing visualizations are available in Video 1 and Video 2.