Aircraft Parameter Estimation Using a Stacked Long Short-Term Memory Network and Levenberg-Marquardt Method

To effectively estimate the unknown aerodynamic parameters from the aircraft's flight data,this paper proposes a novel aerodynamic parameter estimation method incorporating a stacked Long Short-Term Memory(LSTM)network model and the Levenberg-Marquardt(LM)method.The stacked LSTM network model was designed to realize the aircraft dynamics modeling by utilizing a frame of nonlinear functional mapping based entirely on the measured input-output data of the aircraft system without requiring explicit postulation of the dynamics.The LM method combines the already-trained LSTM network model to optimize the unknown aerodynamic param-eters.The proposed method is applied by using the real flight data,generated by ATTAS aircraft and a bio-inspired morphing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle(UAV).The investigation reveals that for the two different flight data,the designed stacked LSTM network structure can maintain the effi-cacy of the network prediction capability only by appropriately adjusting the dropout rates of its hidden layers without changing other network parameters(i.e.,the initial weights,initial biases,number of hidden cells,time-steps,learning rate,and number of training iterations).Besides,the proposed method's effectiveness and potential are demonstrated by comparing the estimated results of the ATTAS aircraft or the bio-inspired morphing UAV with the corresponding reference values or wind-tunnel results.