GPU-Accelerated Astrodynamics World Models for Spacecraft Rendezvous and Proximity Operations
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Abstract (arXiv)
World models are an emerging paradigm in representation learning in which an agent jointly learns state-action dynamics and observation models from offline trajectory data, enabling multi-step planning and trajectory prediction with uncertainty estimates. They have shown strong results in robotics and game environments, but, to the best of our knowledge, have not previously been applied to the space domain. This paper introduces a world model-based approach to cooperative and non-cooperative spacecraft rendezvous and proximity operations. First, we introduce an open-source, JAX-based International Space Station (ISS) docking environment supporting parallel GPU simulation of spacecraft orbit and attitude dynamics, generating the thousands of state-action transitions that world model training requires. Second, we introduce Out-of-this-World-Model, a transformer-based world model that encodes relative kinematic states and body-fixed camera imagery into a latent state and predicts its evolution under commanded thrusts and torques using one-step flow matching. It produces a distribution over future observations, capturing stochastic dynamics and per-timestep uncertainty, and outperforms DreamerV3-style posterior-correction baselines with fewer trainable parameters and hyperparameters. Third, we apply the approach to a capsule autonomously docking with the ISS under keep-out-zone constraints, demonstrating improved sample efficiency and task performance over reinforcement learning baselines (53% versus 29% docking success across ports), better out-of-distribution generalization (on held-out ports the world model more than doubles baseline success, 40% versus 17%), and detection of anomalous objects encountered during approach with 98% classification accuracy. We open-source the simulation environment and model architecture to enable further study of this paradigm.
Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in World models for navigation, one of 11 directions in World models. Builds on 11 of its 49 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2026.
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11 of 49 references.
References · 11
- 2017Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithmscited by 15,215
- 2022Flow Matching for Generative Modelingcited by 5,702
- 2022Flow Straight and Fast: Learning to Generate and Transfer Data with Rectified Flowcited by 3,700
- 2018World Modelscited by 1,513
- 2023Mastering Diverse Domains through World Modelscited by 1,253
- 2024One Step Diffusion via Shortcut Modelscited by 391
- 2026LeWorldModel: Stable End-to-End Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture from Pixelscited by 273
- 2018Deep Dynamical Modeling and Control of Unsteady Fluid Flowscited by 68
- 2022Investigating Compounding Prediction Errors in Learned Dynamics Modelscited by 47
- 2019Deep Variational Koopman Models: Inferring Koopman Observations for Uncertainty-Aware Dynamics Modeling and Controlcited by 18
- 2026Foundational World Models Accurately Detect Bimanual Manipulator Failurescited by 11
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- 2026Sampling-based Kinodynamic Planning with World Models
- 2026G-MAPP: GPU-accelerated Multi-Agent Planning and Perception for Reactive Motion Generation ↗
- 2026Interactive World Simulator for Robot Policy Training and Evaluation
- 2025Space Robotics Bench: Robot Learning Beyond Earth
- 2026Imitation learning-based spacecraft rendezvous and docking method with Expert Demonstration
- 2023Orbit: A Unified Simulation Framework for Interactive Robot Learning Environments
- 2025Multi-Phase Spacecraft Trajectory Optimization via Transformer-Based Reinforcement Learning
- 2025Global Search for Optimal Low Thrust Spacecraft Trajectories using Diffusion Models and the Indirect Method