Winners were announced Nov. 12 at an exhibition in New York City's Central Park and will be featured in the magazine's December issue. The flights are taking place at Edwards, Calif., with the support of NASA Dryden Flight Research Center. The model is a Mach 5 waverider concept, a futuristic hypersonic aircraft configuration that could cruise on top of its own shockwave if powered to hypersonic speeds. Waverider aircraft, powered by airbreathing hypersonic engines, would fly at speeds above Mach 4. The aircraft has been designed to demonstrate that neural network flight controls are superior to conventional flight controls.
Neural networks are computer systems that actually learn by doing.
The computer network consists of many interconnected control systems, or nodes, similar to neurons in the brain. Each node assigns a value to the input from each of its counterparts. As these values are changed, the network can adjust the way it responds. The network will be able to continually alter the aircraft's control laws in order to optimize flight performance and take the pilot's responses into consideration. Over time, the neural network system could be trained to control the aircraft.