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Pilot Demonstration Based Reinforcement Learning With Application To Low Speed Airship Control, Onur Daskiran

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations

Designing control systems for airship has unique challenges as compared to conventional aircraft. Highly nonlinear dynamics, different mass/inertia relations, vast uncertainties in the model parameters and underactuation are the main reasons behind this. Airship dynamics is greatly influenced by the variations in the environmental (e.g.,room temperature) and internal (e.g., helium distribution in envelope) factors that can completely change the response characteristics of the blimp and make it infeasible for a model-based controller to perform. On the other hand, a skilled RC pilot can operate the manual flight easily under these conditions. This makes LfD (learning from demonstration) and RL (reinforcement …