A Multi-step and Eligibility Trace Approach to Incremental Dual Heuristic Programming for Flight Control

Conference Paper (2026)
Author(s)

W.Y. Chan (Student TU Delft)

E. van Kampen (TU Delft - Aerospace Engineering)

Research Group
Control & Simulation
DOI related publication
https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2026-1585 Final published version
More Info
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Publication Year
2026
Language
English
Research Group
Control & Simulation
Article number
AIAA 2026-1585
Publisher
American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc. (AIAA)
ISBN (electronic)
978-1-62410-765-8
Event
AIAA SCITECH 2026 Forum (2026-01-12 - 2026-01-16), Orlando, United States
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Abstract

Incremental Dual Heuristic Programming (IDHP) is a successor to the Dual Heuristic Programming (DHP) algorithm that uses an online identified incremental system model, this algorithm showed promising online learning and fault tolerance in simulated flights. This paper studies the potential for extending IDHP through augmenting the computation of agent updates and returns, more specifically, by using eligibility trace updates and multi-step temporal difference error. This results in the IDHP, multi-step IDHP (MIDHP), and MIDHP variants, which are compared against IDHP in simulated flight scenarios with faults introduced mid-flight. The results demonstrate that flight controllers derived from the proposed variants have improved reference tracking & fault tolerance over the baseline IDHP, with the most improvement observed in MIDHP.

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