Adaptive Critic Control For Aircraft Lateral-Directional Dynamics

Loss of control-in flight (LOC-I) is one of the causes of catastrophic aircraft accidents. Fault-tolerant flight control (FTFC) systems can prevent LOC-I and recover aircraft from LOC-I precursors. One group of promising methods for developing Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) system is the Adaptive Critic Designs (ACD). Recently one ACD algorithm, called value function based single network adaptive critic (J-SNAC), has emerged and it promises to make applications of ACD more practical by reducing the required amount of computations. This paper discusses the implementation of this framework for the design of a lateral-directional flight controller. The proposed flight controller is trained to perform coordinated-turns with an F16 simulation model. The trained controller was evaluated for tracking two different heading command signals, robustness against sensor noises and partial failure of the ailerons. The controller is found to be effective for the considered assessments.