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arXiv · 2609.12758

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

Allan Minh-Tam Nguyen·Sree Showrya Kotala·Stefan Banioi-Crijman·Kurt Driessens·Rico Möckel
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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 $0/4/5$ shows comparable success for HARL-AC and domain randomization of up to $97.5\%$. On out-of-distribution sea states $7/8/10$, HARL-AC generalizes better, achieving up to $16\%$ higher median success rate at sea state 10, and substantially lower crash rates of up to $14\%$ compared to the domain randomization policy. Furthermore, we show that the adversarially trained policy shows more cautious behavior, slightly increasing timeouts by $<3\%$, but yields safer recovery behavior in severe, unseen conditions.

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Allan Minh-Tam Nguyen, Sree Showrya Kotala, Stefan Banioi-Crijman, Kurt Driessens, Rico Möckel. 2026-09-11. Curriculum-Based Adversarial Heterogeneous Agent Reinforcement Learning for Autonomous Quad-Copter Landing in Maritime Settings. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.12758

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