Investigation of control algorithm for airship before indoor experiment

Abstract

An application of the set-point controller expressed in generalized velocity components for an airship is presented in this paper. The nonlinear controller was proposed originally for fully actuated underwater vehicles. However, in this work it is shown that the same controller can be used for an airship, thanks the velocity transformation, and it is able to detect risk resulting from lost or reduction gain coefficients. Consequently, the shown approach appears an useful tool for investigation of the control algorithm in case of some flight disturbances of motion. It is worth of notice that the analysis gives further insight into the airship dynamics. The performance of the applied controller is tested by simulation on a 6-DOF model of the airship.