Flight control of a hexa-rotor airship: Uncertainty quantification for a range of temperature and pressure conditions

Abstract

The present paper is concerned with the dynamic modeling and design of control laws for a small non-rigid multi-rotor airship constituted of an oblate-spheroid helium balloon coupled with an electric-powered hexa-rotor airframe. The vehicle is assumed to operate in windless and lowspeed conditions. A six-degree-of-freedom nonlinear dynamic model is derived for it using the Newton-Euler approach and considering, among other common efforts, a restoring torque due to the displacement of the balloon's center of buoyancy above the vehicle's center of mass and the added-mass effect resulting from the air-structure interaction. Using the derived model and assuming a timescale separation between the translational and rotational dynamics, the attitude and position control laws are designed separately from each other. Both laws are formulated using feedback linearization combined with control input saturation within appropriate parallelepipedal sets, which are carefully chosen to respect pre-defined bounds on the control torque, control force and inclination angle. The effect of temperature and pressure fluctuations is taken into account through a parametric probabilistic approach, where Maximum Entropy Principle is used to construct a physically consistent stochastic model and Monte Carlo method is used as stochastic solver to propagate the uncertainties through the system. Extensive simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed control system and quantifies the uncertainty of its performance over a wide range of local temperature and pressure.

Cooperative Threat Engagement Using Drone Swarms

“…To this end, define a command-related CCS S ī ≜ Bi ; ⃗ x ī, ⃗ y ī, ⃗ z ī representing the commanded position and orientation for the MAV i body-fixed frame S i . The attitude and angular velocity control errors can be defined, respectively, as [12], [19], and [27] Di…”

Agent‐based stratosphere airship cooperative control for earth‐observing system

“…Figures 10 and 11 depict the trajectories of position and velocity for all the airships using the control protocol presented in (13). It can be seen that the following can efficiently track the position and velocity of leader airship by utilizing the protocol in (13).…”

“…In Reference 12, the path‐following of a stratospheric airship with asymmetric error‐constrained is studied, in which the external disturbances and actuator saturation are considered. The flight control of a hexa‐rotor airship is researched for the temperature and pressure conditions of uncertainty quantification in Reference 13. There are other research on the airship in References 14‐19.…”

Full-state modeling and nonlinear control of balloon supported unmanned aerial vehicle

“…This problem can be handled either by using more rotors in MUAV or by adding a moment arm between the balloon and quadrotor. Hence, the design was further modified to hexa-copter airship to use the advantage of more rotors so that the effect of added-mass induced by the balloon may be mitigated (Dos Santos and Cunha, 2019). The feedback linearizing control was developed to stabilize the system in a windless environment with slow speed constraints.…”

“…The rope provides flexibility to both the balloon and quadrotor dynamics to keep different positions, and hence, mitigates the effect of added-mass of balloon onto the orientation of quadrotor. Additionally, the orientation of the balloon has no effect on quadrotor orientation which was a major concern in the structure of previous research (Santos and Cunha, 2017;Dos Santos and Cunha, 2019). To avoid the complexity of the system while landing, the overall vehicle is not LTA, rather it has a small weight of about 100 grams.…”