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Moving-mass-based station keeping of stratospheric airships

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 June 2021

L. Chen Open the ORCID record for L. Chen [Opens in a new window] ,
Q. Gao ,
Y. Deng  and
J. Liu
L. Chen*
Affiliation:
School of Air Transportation, Shanghai University of Engineering Science, Shanghai, China State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, China
Q. Gao
Affiliation:
School of Air Transportation, Shanghai University of Engineering Science, Shanghai, China
Y. Deng
Affiliation:
School of Air Transportation, Shanghai University of Engineering Science, Shanghai, China
J. Liu
Affiliation:
State Key Laboratory of Robotics, Shenyang Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang, China
*
cl200432@tom.com
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Abstract

Stratospheric airships are lighter-than-air vehicles that work at an altitude of 20km in the lower calm portion of the stratosphere. They can be used as real-time surveillance platforms for environment monitoring and civil communication. Solar energy is the ideal power choice for long-endurance stratospheric airships. Attitude control is important for airships so that they can point at a target for observation or adjust the attitude to improve the output performance of solar panels. Stratospheric airships have a large volume and semi-flexible structure. The typical actuators used are aerodynamic surfaces, vectored thrust and ballonets. However, not all these actuators can work well under special working conditions, such as low density and low speed. In this study, moving-mass control is introduced to stratospheric airships because its control efficiency is independent of airspeed and atmospheric density. A nonlinear feedback controller based on generalised inverse with a nonlinear mapping module is designed to implement moving-mass control. Such a new station keeping scheme with moving masses is proposed for airships with different working situations.

Keywords

Stratospheric airship platformMoving-mass controlStation keepingAttitude control

Information

Type
Research Article
Information
The Aeronautical Journal , Volume 125 , Issue 1289 , July 2021 , pp. 1231 - 1244
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Royal Aeronautical Society

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