Airship control

Abstract

This chapter presents an approach to control small sized airships to reach a given goal position, following a planned trajectory. Two sections are devoted to modeling and identification: a simplification of the airship dynamics when the airship speed is stabilized yields to a decoupling of the lateral and longitudinal dynamics. Various controllers to stabilize the speed, altitude and heading are proposed and analyzed. An investigation on the generation of feasible trajectories is proposed, and a controller dedicated to follow the generated trajectories is introduced. Simulations results illustrate the developments, as well as experimental results obtained with two different airships. © 2007 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.