Transformer-Based Warm-Starting for Feasible and Optimal Terminal Approach to Tumbling Objects with Space Manipulators

Autonomous capture of a tumbling object with a space manipulator requires trajectory generation under real-time onboard constraints. However, coupled bus-arm dynamics, rotating safety geometry, and visibility requirements make the underlying optimization severely nonconvex, hence expensive to solve and sensitive to initialization. This paper develops a causal-transformer warm-start for the computationally dominant attitude-manipulator stage of a two-stage sequential convex programming (SCP) framework. Across 300 held-out scenarios evaluated on embedded hardware, the learned warm-start reduces the iterations of the second-stage SCP by up to 32% and runtime by 16% while maintaining numerical feasibility and matching the final control cost. Furthermore, linear and flow matching action decoders are compared across action-chunk lengths and training dataset sizes, where the flow matching decoder exhibits stronger training-data efficiency than the linear decoder. When SCP is terminated based on feasibility, the runtime is further reduced while the learned prior suppresses the severe high-cost tail observed with heuristic initialization. These results demonstrate that learned warm-starts can reduce onboard optimization cost while steering SCP toward basins containing feasible, low-cost solutions.

Comments: 8 pages, 4 figures. Accepted to the IEEE International Conference on Space Robotics (iSpaRo) 2026, Cologne, Germany