Reinforcement Learning for Flight Control of the Flying V

Recent research on the Flying V - a flying-wing long-range passenger aircraft - shows that its airframe design is 25% more aerodynamically efficient than a conventional tube-and-wing airframe. The Flying V is therefore a promising contribution towards reduction in climate impact of long-haul flights. However, some design aspects of the Flying V...

Exploring reinforcement learning methods for autonomous sequencing and spacing of aircraft

Research on reinforcement learning algorithms to play complex video games have brought forth controllers surpassing human performance. This paper explores the possibilities of applying these techniques to the sequencing and spacing of aircraft. Two experiments are performed. First a single aircraft must learn to fly a 4D trajectory using only...

Flexible Curriculum Learning for Deep Reinforcement Learning Agents

Reinforcement Learning (RL) is a learning paradigm that learns by interacting with the environment. In practice, a RL agent needs to perform many actions to sample rewards and state transitions from their environments. Recent advances in using deep neural networks as function approximators reduce the sample complexity in very high dimensional...