Station-keeping control for a stratosphere airship via wind speed prediction approach

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to improve the control precision of the station-keeping control for a stratosphere airship through the feedforward-feedback PID controller which is designed by the wind speed prediction based on the incremental extreme learning machine (I-ELM). Design/methodology/approach First of all, the online prediction of wind speed is implemented by the I-ELM with rolling time. Second, the feedforward-feedback PID controller is designed through the position information of the airship and the predicted wind speed. In the end, the one-dimensional dynamic model of the stratosphere airship is built, and the controller is applied in the numerical simulation. Findings Based on the conducted numerical simulations, some valuable conclusions are obtained. First, through the comparison between the predicted value and true value of the wind speed, the wind speed prediction based on I-ELM is very accurate. Second, the feedforward-feedback PID controller designed in this paper is very effective. Originality/value This paper is very valuable to the research of a high-accuracy station-keeping control of stratosphere airship.