Aerospace Controls Laboratory

Autonomous Air Combat

Jim McGrew

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have the potential to perform many of the complex and possibly dangerous missions currently own by manned aircraft. Within visual range air combat is a particularly difficult and dynamic aerial task which presents many challenges for an autonomous UAS. This project focuses on formulating and solving a function approximation dynamic program to provide maneuvering decisions for autonomous one-on-one air combat. Micro UAS are used at MIT’s Real-time indoor Autonomous Vehicle test ENvironment (RAVEN) to implement and test the planning algorithms.