Benchmarking Multilayer Perceptron Configurations for Damage Classification in UAV Composite Wings Using Fiber Bragg Gratings Sensors.

Structural damage classification in composite UAV wings is a key challenge in Structural Health Monitoring (SHM), particularly under barely visible impact damage conditions. Fiber Bragg Grating (FBG) sensor networks provide high-resolution strain data; however, systematic experimental benchmarking of lightweight neural architectures trained on real FBG datasets remains limited, especially under sensor degradation scenarios. This work presents a four-phase benchmarking study of Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) configurations using strain measurements from a composite UAV wing instrumented with 32 FBG sensors across five damage states and 210 loading experiments. The framework evaluates optimization strategies, hyperparameter sensitivity, architectural depth, and robustness under controlled sensor dropout, Gaussian noise, and wavelength drift perturbations. Results indicate that compact architectures with progressive dimensional reduction (256-128-64) trained using adaptive optimizers (AdamW and Nadam) achieve the best balance between macro-F1 performance (up to 0.85 during validation), stability, and computational efficiency. Robustness analysis shows gradual performance degradation under sensor loss, suggesting distributed strain-field learning. These findings provide practical guidelines for selecting computationally efficient and robust neural models for deployable FBG-based SHM systems in aerospace applications.