L-SDPPO: Policy Optimization of Spiking Diffusion Policy for Intra-vehicular Robotic Manipulation

2026-06-04

AI Summary

This study addresses the challenges of poor manipulation robustness and high energy consumption faced by in-cabin robots operating in microgravity environments, where unconstrained object drift and multimodal action distributions complicate control. To overcome these issues, the authors propose L-SDPPO, a low-energy framework that innovatively integrates spiking neural networks with diffusion policies and introduces a state-dependent latent injection (SDLI) mechanism to enhance perception of dynamic spatiotemporal features. Evaluated across five representative in-cabin tasks, the proposed method significantly outperforms current state-of-the-art approaches, achieving both higher task success rates and substantially reduced energy consumption.

Abstract

Intra-vehicular robots in spacecraft help reduce astronaut workload and improve mission efficiency. Recent research focuses on using deep learning methods to achieve the acute control required for operations in these complex environments. However, objects exhibit unpredictable, unconstrained drift without gravitational damping. These factors demand robustness against complex multimodal action distributions. Diffusion policies (DP) can model these complex actions, but their iterative sampling process consumes too much energy for the limited power budgets of spacecraft. We therefore propose a low-energy intra-vehicular robotic manipulation framework, L-SDPPO, in which the Spiking Diffusion Policy (SDP) is optimized with a reinforcement learning (RL) algorithm. Furthermore, to address the insufficient perception of dynamic spatiotemporal features in microgravity, we propose the statedependent latency injection (SDLI) mechanism, which mimics biological neural delays to dynamically regulate the timing of input information. Evaluation on five representative intra-vehicular daily tasks (e.g., hatch opening and precision container capping) shows that our method consistently achieves higher success rates and lower energy consumption, compared to the state-of-the-art robotic manipulation methods. These results demonstrate our method is a viable intra-vehicular robotic manipulation method.

Problem

• intra-vehicular robotic manipulation
• microgravity
• diffusion policy
• energy efficiency
• multimodal action distribution

Innovation

• Spiking Diffusion Policy
• State-Dependent Latency Injection
• Low-energy Robotic Manipulation
• Intra-vehicular Robotics
• Reinforcement Learning