Reinforcement Learning for Flight Control: Hybrid Offline-Online Learning for Robust and Adaptive Fault-Tolerance

Recent advancements in fault-tolerant flight control have involved model-free offline and online Reinforcement Learning algorithms in order to provide robust and adaptive control to autonomous systems. Inspired by recent work on Incremental Dual Heuristic Programming (IDHP) and Soft Actor-Critic (SAC), this research proposes a hybrid SAC-IDHP...

Longitudinal Flight Control by Reinforcement Learning: Online Adaptive Critic Design Approach to Altitude Control

Reinforcement learning is used as a type of adaptive flight control. Adaptive Critic Design (ACD) is a popular approach for online reinforcement learning control due to its explicit generalization of the policy evaluation and the policy improvement elements. A variant of ACD, Incremental Dual Heuristic Programming (IDHP) has previously been...

Online Reinforcement Learning for Flight Control: An Adaptive Critic Design without prior model knowledge

Online Reinforcement Learning is a possible solution for adaptive nonlinear flight control. In this research an Adaptive Critic Design (ACD) based on Dual Heuristic Dynamic Programming (DHP) is developed and implemented on a simulated Cessna Citation 550 aircraft. Using an online identified system model approximation, the method is independent...

Reinforcement Learning for Flight Control: Learning to Fly the PH-LAB

In recent years Adaptive Critic Designs (ACDs) have been applied to adaptive flight control of uncertain, nonlinear systems. However, these algorithms often rely on representative models as they require an offline training stage. Therefore, they have limited applicability to a system for which no accurate system model is available, nor readily...

Online reinforcement learning control for aerospace systems

Reinforcement Learning (RL) methods are relatively new in the field of aerospace guidance, navigation, and control. This dissertation aims to exploit RL methods to improve the autonomy and online learning of aerospace systems with respect to the a priori unknown system and environment, dynamical uncertainties, and partial observability. In the...

Adaptive-Critic Designs For Aircraft Control: A comparative study between Heuristic Dynamic Programming and Dual Heuristic Programming

The Variable Camber Continuous Trailing Edge Flap (VCCTEF) is a novel aircraft control system that intents to prevent undesired aeroelastic deflections by precise lift tailoring along the wing span. However, the unknown dynamics and increased complexity of the new hardware imposes difficulties to establish an optimal controller. One approach is...