Control system design of a multivectored thrust stratospheric airship

Abstract

Given their hovering ability, static lift airships, such as airships and balloons, are proposed as stratospheric platforms flying at a high altitude of 20 km. The shape of the envelope has a major influence on the lift and drag efficiency of an airship. Furthermore, the efficiency of a conventional actuator, such as an aerodynamic control surface for stratospheric platforms, is decreased by the low-atmospheric density and flight speed. Thus, a new type of effector configuration must be proposed. A new multivectored thrust airship called flat peach is proposed in this paper. The name is attributed to the shape of the airship, which resembles a flat peach that is a cross between a ball and a water droplet. Thus, this airship has a smaller drag coefficient than the spherical airship and higher lift efficiency than a conventional airship. A control allocation strategy among the multivectored thrusters is proposed, and a composite control structure is designed for the airship to realize accurate position control and to decrease energy consumption.

Nonlinear MPC for a Sensorless Multi‐Vectored Propeller Airship Based on Sliding Mode Observer with Saturation

“…where q ∞ = 1 2 V 2 a is the dynamic pressure. C x , C z , C my , C mz are the aerodynamic coefficients [50]. They are obtained by wind-tunnel experiments.…”

Modeling and path-following control of a vector-driven stratospheric satellite

“…It has been used in the development of stratospheric aircraft control system in recent years (Yang et al, 2014;Yang and Yan, 2015;Yang et al, 2013Yang et al, , 2012. Chen et al (2013) presented a composite control structure for the stratospheric airship to realize accurate position control and to decrease energy consumption, which took the control allocation problem into consideration.…”

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“…where , Ω, , denote the airship relative position, the airship attitudes in Euler angles, the airship velocities under body axis and the airship angular velocities, respectively. Then the dynamic equation of the airship [27] could be described as:…”