Intelligent control for near-autonomous aircraft missions

The focus of this paper is the design and implementation of a full envelope, nonlinear aircraft controller that includes stability augmentation, tracking control, and flight-path generation. The control system is demonstrated using a 6 degree-of-freedom (DOF) high performance aircraft model with nonlinear kinematics, full-envelope nonlinear aerodynamics, first-order thrust model, and first-order actuator dynamics. Ideas from the field of intelligent control were used in the definition of the controller architecture. More specifically, "levels of intelligent control" were used to provide a systematic structure for the architecture. Several ideas from the field of computational intelligence were also used including neural networks, genetic algorithms, and adaptive critics.