Lateral and Longitudinal Optimal Control for Unmmaned Blimp

Abstract

Observing environtment is difficult due to wide spaces scales. In order to overcome this problem, observing from the highest point seems the fastest way to concur the frontier. Therefore, a blimp is very suitable for data gathering compared to other aerial vehicles. This is because it has an ability to hover at low altitude and speed. In addition, controller improves the autonomous flight stability and performance allowing an accurate aerial navigation system. The goal of this work is to design a controller for an unmanned blimp for a closed-loop navigation on horizontal and vertical motion. The proposed control approach will improve the blimp heading; hence reduce unneccessary movements according to the desired specification. Due to that, non-rigid airship model has been designed according to our blimp specification. Thus, an optimal control is used to utilize the decoupled model for the lateral and longitudinal motion, which included the wind disturbance. Simualtions were performed to validate the proposed design and comparison was done for larger size of the blimp. The results show that the smaller version of airship is not stable compared to the larger size but the controller was able to follow the desired path with low control signal and faster converges.