Global path following control for underactuated stratospheric airship

This paper develops a nonlinear path following control method that drives an underactuated stratospheric airship onto a predefined planar path with a given speed profile. The dynamic model of the airship used for controller design is first introduced with kinematics and dynamics equations. In order to render good pilot behavior for the control action, a guidance controller by referring to the guidance-based path following principle is derived. Then the controller is extended to cope with the airship attitude and velocity by resorting to the backstepping and Lyapunov-based techniques. The designed control system finally possesses a cascaded structure which consists of guidance loop, attitude control loop and velocity control loop. Stability analysis shows that the controlled closed-loop system is globally asymptotically stable, and the sway velocity which cannot be directly controlled is bounded. Simulation results for the airship following typical paths are illustrated to verify effectiveness of the proposed approach.