Safe Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning for CubeSat Task Scheduling Based on Energy Consumption

Abstract: This paper presents a Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning methodology tailored for optimizing CubeSat task scheduling in Low Earth Orbits (LEO). Incorporating a high-level policy for global task distribution and a low-level policy for real-time adaptations as a safety mechanism, our approach integrates the Similarity Attention-based Encoder (SABE) for task prioritization and an MLP estimator for energy consumption forecasting. Integrating this mechanism creates a safe and fault-tolerant system for CubeSat task scheduling. Simulation results validate the Hierarchical Reinforcement Learning superior convergence and task success rate, outperforming both the MADDPG model and traditional random scheduling across multiple CubeSat configurations.