cs.LGSep 14, 2026

Curriculum-Based Adversarial Heterogeneous Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Quad-Copter Landing in Maritime Settings

Authors: Allan Minh-Tam NguyenSree Showrya KotalaStefan Banioi-CrijmanKurt DriessensRico Möckel

Abstract

Recovering unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) in maritime environments is challenging due to wind turbulence and ship-deck motion, making it a valuable test case for alternative control and learning approaches as conventional landing approaches often become unreliable. We study simulated mid-air capture of quadrotor UAVs by a ship-mounted robotic arm, learning robust cooperative control policies with Heterogeneous-Agent Proximal Policy Optimization (HAPPO) Reinforcement Learning. We train with HAPPO using a curriculum and an adversarial wind agent (HARL-AC) in NVIDIA Isaac Lab, and compare the obtained control policies against those generated through curriculum-based domain randomization and a benchmark trained on a single sea state. In-distribution evaluation on sea states 0/4/50/4/5 shows comparable success for HARL-AC and domain randomization of up to 97.5%97.5\%. On out-of-distribution sea states 7/8/107/8/10, HARL-AC generalizes better, achieving up to 16%16\% higher median success rate at sea state 10, and substantially lower crash rates of up to 14%14\% compared to the domain randomization policy. Furthermore, we show that the adversarially trained policy shows more cautious behavior, slightly increasing timeouts by <3%<3\%, but yields safer recovery behavior in severe, unseen conditions.

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