Command-filtered backstepping control for a multi-vectored thrust stratospheric airship

Abstract

A stratospheric airship is an airship flying at a high altitude of 20 km as a stratospheric platform. Due to the low atmospheric density and flight speed, the efficiency of a conventional actuator, such as an aerodynamic control surface, is decreased. Thus, a new multi-vectored thrust airship called a flat peach is discussed in this paper. This article describes the derivation, design and simulation implementation of a non-linear controller for an airship with multi-vector thrust. The controller is designed using a command-filtered, vector backstepping approach, and can set the airship track three Cartesian positions $(x,y,z)$ and yaw angle to their desired values and stabilize the pitch and roll angles. The controller is non-linear to address the kinematics and airship dynamics. The approach guarantees exponential stability of a compensated tracking error in the sense of Lyapunov. Both the stability analysis and simulation results are included.