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This research received partial funding from the Government of Spain under the project PID2023-151110OB-I00 and Generalitat Valenciana under CIPROM/2022/3 and CIACIF/2021/286. This research project is part of the programme DesCartes and is supported by the National Research Foundation, Prime Minister's Office, Singapore under its Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE) programme. Funding for open access charge: Universitat Politecnica de Valencia.

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Artificial Intelligence-Driven Aircraft Systems to Emulate Autopilot and GPS Functionality in GPS-Denied Scenarios Through Deep Learning

Publicated to:Drones. 9 (4): 250- - 2025-03-26 9(4), DOI: 10.3390/drones9040250

Authors: Garcia-Gascon, Cesar; Castello-Pedrero, Pablo; Chinesta, Francisco; Garcia-Manrique, Juan A

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Abstract

This paper presents a methodology for training a Deep Learning model aimed at flight management tasks in a fixed-wing unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), specifically autopilot control and GPS prediction. In this formulation, sensor data and the most recent GPS signal are first processed by an LSTM to produce an initial coordinate prediction. This preliminary estimate is then merged with additional sensor inputs and passed to an MLP, which replaces the conventional autopilot algorithm by generating the control commands for real-time navigation. The approach is particularly valuable in scenarios where the aircraft must follow a predetermined route-such as surveillance operations-or maintain a remote ground link under varying GPS availability. The study focuses on Class I UAVs; however, the proposed methodology can be adapted to larger classes (II and III) by adjusting sensor configurations and network parameters. To collect training data, a small fixed-wing aircraft was instrumented to record kinematic and control inputs, which then served as inputs to the neural network. Despite the limited sensor suite and the use of an open-source flight controller (SpeedyBee), the flexibility of the proposed approach allows for easy adaptation to more complex UAVs equipped with additional sensors, potentially improving prediction accuracy. The performance of the neural network, implemented in PyTorch, was evaluated by comparing its predicted data with actual flight logs. In addition, the method has been shown to be robust to both short and prolonged GPS outages, as it relies on waypoint-based navigation along previously explored routes, ensuring reliable performance in known operational contexts.

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