Coordinated intelligent control of the flight control system and shape change of variable sweep morphing aircraft based on dueling-DQN

Abstract

This work develops a method of coordinated control between the flight control system and the morphing mechanism for a variable sweep morphing aircraft. A variable sweep morphing aircraft model with six degrees of freedom is established and separated into cascaded loops. Based on the principle of multi-time scale separation, the proportional-integral control, nonlinear dynamic inversion, and incremental nonlinear dynamic inversion methods are employed to design a flight control system as the basic controller to manipulate the control surfaces and engine thrust. Considering the difficulty of designing a morphing controller based on a model-based approach and the requirement of optimizing the flight performance through morphing, we design a dueling-deep Q network learning-based intelligent morphing controller. Further, we take the basic controller and dynamic model of the aircraft as the environments in the framework of reinforcement learning. The time step of the agent is extended to solve the convergence problem caused by the short control cycle. Furthermore, the state space, action selection strategy, and performance index function are properly designed. The results from the simulations validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.