Modelling and control of airship for low altitude surveillances application

Abstract

Aerial perspective provide great viewing window especially for surveillance and exploration activities. In responding to the need of green technology, airship is the best alternative for environmental friendly technology. In addition, airship is safer for low altitudes flying and able to maneuver at low speed in confined area. In order to drive the airship to the desired position, the airship’s rudder must generate a yaw angle. Therefore, this paper presents the techniques to control the navigation path of an airship through the yawing state response. To provide good airship heading, optimal control and feedback control technique were proposed. The main goal is to produce an appropriate output signal by controlling the rudder deflection while reducing the excessive movements of the vehicles. The simulation demonstrate that the proposed controller effectively reduced the excessive movement for yaw rate and roll angle of the airship. It is shown that closed loop system has an error less than 1.6% with minimum overshoot of 2.04%. Comparatively, better results were obtained by introducing higher gain to the optimal controller thus contribute to low control response.