Modeling of a heavy-lift airship carrying a payload by a cable-driven parallel manipulator

Abstract

In this article, we present a preliminary analysis of a heavy-lift airship carrying a payload through a cable-driven parallel robot. With unlimited access to isolated locations around the globe, heavy-lift airship enables affordable and safe delivery of heavy cargo thanks to its vertical takeoff and landing capabilities. By considering the airship and the cable-driven parallel robot as a combined system, the kinematic and dynamic models are developed. The choice of the proposed decentralized control structure is justified by the weak coupling of the two subsystems (i.e. airship and cable-driven parallel robot) which makes it possible to control the above two subsystems independently. A robust sliding mode control, capable of auto-piloting and controlling the airship, is developed. Furthermore, an inverse dynamic controller is applied to the cable-driven parallel robot in order to ensure loading and unloading phase. The feature of the proposed control system is that the coupled dynamics between the airship and the cable-driven parallel robot are explicitly incorporated into control system design, without any simplifying assumption. Numerical simulation results are presented and a stability analysis is provided to confirm the accuracy of our derivations.

Experimental study and refined numerical simulation of ultimate pressure-bearing performance of rope-reinforced airship envelope structures

“…To solve this problem, a flexible airship envelope structure reinforced with sliding reinforcing cables is proposed. The reinforcing cables on the surface of the envelope structure bear part of the load, which reduces the maximum stress on the envelope surface, effectively reducing the areal density of the envelope structure and improving its overall strength, thereby raising its bearing capacity (Abdallah et al, 2019; Zhao et al, 2022). At the same time, due to their constraining effect, the reinforcing cables increase the stiffness of the flexible airship envelope structure, which is beneficial to its overall stability (Jiang et al, 2020).…”

Optimal Tracking Control for Underactuated Airship

“…etc. ), geography and environmental systems, aerial navigation, sea navigation, climate prediction, linking with satellites, remote sensing, crop monitoring, ... etc [4,5,6,7].…”

Multi-body modelling and adaptive control of a re-configurable uninhabited airship

“…There are numerous methods for developing the equations of motion for multi-body systems. An example is presented by Abdallah et al (2019) for an airship with an attached cable-driven payload. The airship was divided into two isolated subsystems and modeled using Kirchhoff equations and the payload motion was considered as a disturbance to the airship.…”