Autonomous landing and go-around of airliners under severe weather conditions using Artificial Neural Networks

We introduce the Intelligent Autopilot System (IAS) which is capable of autonomous landing, and go-around of large jets such as airliners under severe weather conditions. The IAS is a potential solution to the current problem of Automatic Flight Control Systems of being unable to autonomously handle flight uncertainties such as severe weather conditions, autonomous complete flights, and go-around. A robust approach to control the aircraft's bearing using Artificial Neural Networks is proposed. An Artificial Neural Network predicts the appropriate bearing to be followed given the drift from the path line to be intercepted. In addition, the capabilities of the Flight Manager of the IAS are extended to detect unsafe landing attempts, and generate a go-around flight course. Experiments show that the IAS can handle such flight skills and tasks effectively, and can even land aircraft under severe weather conditions that are beyond the maximum demonstrated landing of the aircraft model used in this work as reported by the manufacturer's operations limitations. The proposed IAS is a novel approach towards achieving full control autonomy of large jets using ANN models that match the skills and abilities of experienced human pilots.