Safety-Critical Reinforcement Learning with Viability-Based Action Shielding for Hypersonic Longitudinal Flight

Fuente: arXiv
Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteur principal: Rastgoftar, Hossein
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866911420800565248
author Rastgoftar, Hossein
author_facet Rastgoftar, Hossein
contents This paper presents a safety-critical reinforcement learning framework for nonlinear dynamical systems with continuous state and input spaces operating under explicit physical constraints. Hard safety constraints are enforced independently of the reward through action shielding and reachability-based admissible action sets, ensuring that unsafe behaviors are never intentionally selected during learning or execution. To capture nominal operation and recovery behavior within a single control architecture, the state space is partitioned into safe and unsafe regions based on membership in a safety box, and a mode-dependent reward is used to promote accurate tracking inside the safe region and recovery toward it when operating outside. To enable online tabular learning on continuous dynamics, a finite-state abstraction is constructed via state aggregation, and action selection and value updates are consistently restricted to admissible actions. The framework is demonstrated on a longitudinal point-mass hypersonic vehicle model with aerodynamic and propulsion couplings, using angle of attack and throttle as control inputs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_03968
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Safety-Critical Reinforcement Learning with Viability-Based Action Shielding for Hypersonic Longitudinal Flight
Rastgoftar, Hossein
Systems and Control
This paper presents a safety-critical reinforcement learning framework for nonlinear dynamical systems with continuous state and input spaces operating under explicit physical constraints. Hard safety constraints are enforced independently of the reward through action shielding and reachability-based admissible action sets, ensuring that unsafe behaviors are never intentionally selected during learning or execution. To capture nominal operation and recovery behavior within a single control architecture, the state space is partitioned into safe and unsafe regions based on membership in a safety box, and a mode-dependent reward is used to promote accurate tracking inside the safe region and recovery toward it when operating outside. To enable online tabular learning on continuous dynamics, a finite-state abstraction is constructed via state aggregation, and action selection and value updates are consistently restricted to admissible actions. The framework is demonstrated on a longitudinal point-mass hypersonic vehicle model with aerodynamic and propulsion couplings, using angle of attack and throttle as control inputs.
title Safety-Critical Reinforcement Learning with Viability-Based Action Shielding for Hypersonic Longitudinal Flight
topic Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.03968