TempFuser: Learning Agile, Tactical, and Acrobatic Flight Maneuvers Using a Long Short-Term Temporal Fusion Transformer

TL;DR

TempFuser is a novel transformer-based architecture that learns agile, tactical, and acrobatic flight maneuvers for aerial dogfighting, integrating long-term tactics and short-term agility to outperform baseline models in complex simulations.

Contribution

Introduces TempFuser, a long short-term temporal fusion transformer that captures both strategic and agile flight maneuvers in dogfight scenarios, enabling robust and human-like aerial tactics.

Findings

Outperforms baseline policies in complex dogfight simulations

Exhibits human-like acrobatic maneuvers against superior opponents

Demonstrates robustness in supersonic and low-altitude pursuits

Abstract

Dogfighting is a challenging scenario in aerial applications that requires a comprehensive understanding of both strategic maneuvers and the aerodynamics of agile aircraft. The aerial agent needs to not only understand tactically evolving maneuvers of fighter jets from a long-term perspective but also react to rapidly changing aerodynamics of aircraft from a short-term viewpoint. In this paper, we introduce TempFuser, a novel long short-term temporal fusion transformer architecture that can learn agile, tactical, and acrobatic flight maneuvers in complex dogfight problems. Our approach integrates two distinct temporal transition embeddings into a transformer-based network to comprehensively capture both the long-term tactics and short-term agility of aerial agents. By incorporating these perspectives, our policy network generates end-to-end flight commands that secure dominant positions over the long term and effectively outmaneuver agile opponents. After training in a high-fidelity flight simulator, our model successfully learns to execute strategic maneuvers, outperforming baseline policy models against various types of opponent aircraft. Notably, our model exhibits human-like acrobatic maneuvers even when facing adversaries with superior specifications, all without relying on prior knowledge. Moreover, it demonstrates robust pursuit performance in challenging supersonic and low-altitude situations. Demo videos are available at https://sites.google.com/view/tempfuser.