Deep Reinforcement Learning based Control Design for Aircraft Recovery from Loss-of-Control Scenario

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Sayyed, Imran, Konar, Aayush, Sinha, Nandan Kumar
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Sayyed, Imran
Konar, Aayush
Sinha, Nandan Kumar
author_facet Sayyed, Imran
Konar, Aayush
Sinha, Nandan Kumar
contents Loss-of-control (LOC) remains a leading cause of fixed-wing aircraft accidents, especially in post-stall and flat-spin regimes where conventional gain-scheduled or logic-based recovery laws may fail. This study formulates spin-recovery as a continuous-state, continuous-action Markov Decision Process and trains a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agent on a high-fidelity six-degree-of-freedom F-18/HARV model that includes nonlinear aerodynamics, actuator saturation and rate coupling. A two-phase potential-based reward structure first penalizes large angular rates and then enforces trimmed flight. After 6,000 simulated episodes, the policy generalities to unseen upset initializations. Results show that the learned policy successfully arrests the angular rates and stabilizes the angle of attack. The controller performance is observed to be satisfactory for recovery from spin condition which was compared with a state-of-the-art sliding mode controller. The findings demonstrate that deep reinforcement learning can deliver interpretable, dynamically feasible manoeuvres for real-time loss of control mitigation and provide a pathway for flight-critical RL deployment.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_06439
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Deep Reinforcement Learning based Control Design for Aircraft Recovery from Loss-of-Control Scenario
Sayyed, Imran
Konar, Aayush
Sinha, Nandan Kumar
Systems and Control
Loss-of-control (LOC) remains a leading cause of fixed-wing aircraft accidents, especially in post-stall and flat-spin regimes where conventional gain-scheduled or logic-based recovery laws may fail. This study formulates spin-recovery as a continuous-state, continuous-action Markov Decision Process and trains a Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) agent on a high-fidelity six-degree-of-freedom F-18/HARV model that includes nonlinear aerodynamics, actuator saturation and rate coupling. A two-phase potential-based reward structure first penalizes large angular rates and then enforces trimmed flight. After 6,000 simulated episodes, the policy generalities to unseen upset initializations. Results show that the learned policy successfully arrests the angular rates and stabilizes the angle of attack. The controller performance is observed to be satisfactory for recovery from spin condition which was compared with a state-of-the-art sliding mode controller. The findings demonstrate that deep reinforcement learning can deliver interpretable, dynamically feasible manoeuvres for real-time loss of control mitigation and provide a pathway for flight-critical RL deployment.
title Deep Reinforcement Learning based Control Design for Aircraft Recovery from Loss-of-Control Scenario
topic Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.06439