Diffusion-Based Multiple-Shooting Indirect Optimal Control for Fuel-Optimal Spacecraft Trajectory Generation

Preliminary low-thrust spacecraft mission design is a global search problem characterized by a complex solution landscape, multiple objectives, and numerous local minima. During this phase, mission parameters are often not yet fully defined, requiring new solutions to be generated at a high cadence across varying parameter values. When combined with the indirect approach to optimal control, diffusion models can accelerate this search by learning distributions that represent high-quality initial costates. However, generating training data remains expensive, and opportunities exist to better exploit past data. We propose a transfer-learning framework that combines homotopy in a mission parameter with Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) to generate training data more efficiently. The approach reformulates a multiobjective optimization problem as sampling from an unnormalized target distribution in costate space. We compare three MCMC algorithms on a planar multi-revolution transfer in the circular restricted three-body problem, with homotopy in the system mass parameter. The results show that gradient-based MCMC variants achieve the best trade-off between sample quality and computational cost. For the test transfer, the proposed framework generates 40 % more feasible solutions and achieves a higher-quality Pareto front than a state-of-the-art indirect approach based on adjoint control transformations and gradient-based optimization. Finally, the MCMC-generated samples are used to fine-tune a diffusion model conditioned on the mass parameter, enabling it to learn a global representation of the underlying solution distribution and efficiently generate new solutions. These findings establish the transfer-learning framework as a practical method for efficiently solving indirect trajectory optimization problems with varying parameters.

This work reformulates language generation as a stochastic optimal control problem, providing a unified theoretical perspective to analyze autoregressive and diffusion models and explain their limitations (Efficiency-Fidelity Paradox, Irreversibility Error Propagation, Optimization Tractability and Fidelity) in terms of combination of trajectory singularity, adjoint state vanishing, and gradient absence. To address these issues, we approximate the solution to the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation, yielding an optimal policy that acts as a closed-loop controller. To bypass the intractability of directly solving the HJB PDE, we employ Flow Matching as the optimal trajectory solver within the rectified latent control space. This allows our Manta-LM with Global Integral Operator to approximate the global vector field, effectively realizing a model that simultaneously achieves high-fidelity text generation and efficient, low-cost parallel sampling. Empirically, our method achieves strong performance on language modeling and conditional generation tasks, while exhibiting improved stability, efficiency, and controllability.

Low-thrust trajectory optimization is a core technology in deep-space mission design. Indirect methods based on Pontryagin's Minimum Principle (PMP) offer rigorous optimality guarantees, yet their practical application faces three bottlenecks: (1) transversality conditions must be derived case by case for each constraint type; (2) different dynamics models require repeated code rewrites; and (3) shooting equations are highly sensitive to initial guesses. This paper presents HELIOS (Heuristic Engine for Low-thrust Interplanetary Optimization System), a trajectory optimization agent built around a large language model (LLM). Given a physical problem described in natural language, the system autonomously performs PMP symbolic derivation, SymPy verification, C++ shooting-code generation, and numerical solution without human intervention. Key innovations include: (1) a constraint-adaptive derivation framework that unifies arbitrary constraints into psi(x,p)=0 form and automatically generates stationarity conditions for free parameters (e.g., gravity-assist turning angle); (2) dynamics-adaptive four-module code generation supporting non-standard dynamics (solar sail, J2 perturbation) without modifying the underlying template; and (3) a general derivation rule set covering critical error-prone points in PMP derivation. Experiments on 11 progressive test scenarios show that HELIOS correctly derives and solves problems from simple rendezvous (8 variables) to multi-leg stay transfers (48 variables), gravity-assist trajectories (17 variables), and solar-sail minimum-time transfers (8 variables). The best compilation success rate reaches 100% (11/11). A multi-model comparison (8 open-source LLM backends, total scores 250-905) verifies the model-agnostic architecture and reveals a positive correlation between model scale and derivation capability.