Language Models are Spacecraft Operators
Victor Rodriguez-Fernandez Alejandro Carrasco Jason Cheng Eli Scharf Peng Mun Siew Richard Linares
Recent trends are emerging in the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as
autonomous agents that take actions based on the content of the user text
prompts. We intend to apply these concepts to the field of Guidance,
Navigation, and Control in space, enabling LLMs to have a significant role in
the decision-making process for autonomous satellite operations. As a first
step towards this goal, we have developed a pure LLM-based solution for the
Kerbal Space Program Differential Games (KSPDG) challenge, a public software
design competition where participants create autonomous agents for maneuvering
satellites involved in non-cooperative space operations, running on the KSP
game engine. Our approach leverages prompt engineering, few-shot prompting, and
fine-tuning techniques to create an effective LLM-based agent that ranked 2nd
in the competition. To the best of our knowledge, this work pioneers the
integration of LLM agents into space research. Code is available at
https://github.com/ARCLab-MIT/kspdg.