Biologically Inspired Biologically Inspired Direct Adaptive Guidance and Control for High-Bandwidth Flight Systems

"The capability of biological flight systems to autonomously maneuver, track, and pursue evasive targets in a cluttered environment is vastly superior to current engineered systems. The proposed effort seeks to fully characterize the tracking, guidance andcontrol functions of one such biological system (the male flesh fly in pursuit of the female), and to use the developed understanding to improve the design of engineered guidance and control systems for small autonomous air vesicles. The phase I effortproduced demonstration of feasibility in three distinct areas: development and demonstration in simulation of a direct neural network adaptive guidance law for intercept; development and demonstration of experimental methods to capture and quantify thetrajectories and orientation of the insects in pursuit/evasion scenarios; and further development and demonstration of practical image processing algorithms for implementation of the developed guidance system concepts. The proposed phase II program willextend and expand the work in these three areas to produce practical biologically-inspired tracking, guidance and control algoithms for comparison to traditionally engineered methods in both real-time hardware-in-the-loop simulation and flight test."