Robust Global Exponential Stabilization of an Underactuated Airship
| Authors: | Yamada Manabu, Nagoya Institute of Technology, Japan
Tomizuka Masayoshi, University of California at Berkeley, United States |
|---|
| Topic: | 7.3 Aerospace |
|---|
| Session: | Theoretical Methods of Aircraft Control |
|---|
| Keywords: | aerospace, autonomous vehicle, attitude and position control, nonlinear system, perturbed coefficients, uncertainty, global stability, exponentially stable, robust control, nonholonomic systems |
|---|
Abstract
Airship is a unique vehicle which enables safe and long-duration flight and station keeping. Recently, the interest to unmanned airships has been increasing. This paper considers the problem of controlling both the planar position and orientation of an underactuated airship with a reduced number of actuators. The airship is a nonholonomic system described by a set of nonlinear equations and the dynamics are subject to bounded uncertainties. A smooth and time-varying coordinate transformation is utilized to reduce the stabilization problem of the airship to that of a linear time-invariant system. A new robust feedback controller is presented for obtaining global exponential stabilization of the airship in the presence of the plant uncertainties. The proposed design method is simple and straightforward. Experiments are performed to validate the effectiveness of the proposed controller.
