View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2023-4046.vid
Dynamic soaring is a biologically inspired flight strategy that could be used to extend the operational time and range of small unmanned aerial vehicles. Developing an autonomous flight controller that can take advantage of the energy in the wind has proven to be difficult. Recent advancements in the fields of artificial intelligence and deep reinforcement learning have shown promising results in continuous control problems with long time horizons. In this paper, we will demonstrate a framework for developing control policies that can perform power-supplemented dynamic soaring, managing mechanical the and electrical energy of a powered virtual flight vehicle in a simulated environment.
