English

Hypernetwork-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning for Robust Control of Fixed-Wing Aircraft under Actuator Failures

Systems and Control 2026-04-08 v1 Machine Learning Systems and Control

Abstract

This paper presents a reinforcement learning-based path-following controller for a fixed-wing small uncrewed aircraft system (sUAS) that is robust to certain actuator failures. The controller is conditioned on a parameterization of actuator faults using hypernetwork-based adaptation. We consider parameter-efficient formulations based on Feature-wise Linear Modulation (FiLM) and Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), trained using proximal policy optimization. We demonstrate that hypernetwork-conditioned policies can improve robustness compared to standard multilayer perceptron policies. In particular, hypernetwork-conditioned policies generalize effectively to time-varying actuator failure modes not encountered during training. The approach is validated through high-fidelity simulations, using a realistic six-degree-of-freedom fixed-wing aircraft model.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.03392,
  title  = {Hypernetwork-Conditioned Reinforcement Learning for Robust Control of Fixed-Wing Aircraft under Actuator Failures},
  author = {Dennis Marquis and Mazen Farhood},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.03392},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:53:23.939Z