NASA’s Intelligent Flight Control System

How A.I. helped NASA to improve modern flight control systems

NASA’s NF-15B showing the canards added to the original F-15 structure. New range safety and range user system antennas for the ECANS project can be seen just behind and to the left of the cockpit on NASA’s NF-15B research aircraft. Photo credits NASA, Lori Losey

At the beginning of this century, from 1999 to 2008, NASA Dryden Flight Research Center started a novel research program to investigate applications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to reduce a pilot’s workload after a flight controls failure.

With this research, NASA aimed to prove that the symbiosis between AI and state-of-the-art control algorithms could render a self-healing control software.

The AI was intended to be a key element of the digital “fly-by-wire” system of the aircraft, providing real-time estimations of the aircraft’s aerodynamic derivatives, which were then used to redesign in real-time the flight control strategy. This control architecture was defined by NASA as the Intelligent Flight Control System (IFCS).

This logo represents NASA F-15 #837 demonstrating the use of neural networks through revolutionary control approaches that could efficiently optimize aircraft performance in normal and failure conditions. Credit NASA. Logotype author David Faust.

The IFCS was a very ambitious project which involved not only the Dryden Flight Research Center but also the NASA Ames Research Center, Boeing Phantom Works, the Institute for Scientific Research at West Virginia University, and the Georgia Institute of Technology.