ℒ1 adaptive path-following of airships in wind

Abstract

This paper proposes an adaptive, three dimensional (3D) path-following controller for airships in the presence of wind disturbances, which explicitly considers that wind speed is time-varying. The main idea is to formulate airship path-following as control design for systems in the presence of parametric uncertainties and external disturbances. Assuming that there is no prior information on wind, the proposed solution is based on the ℒ1 adaptive controller. This approach makes clear statements for performance specifications of the controller and relaxes the common assumption that wind speed is constant. This makes the design more realistic and the analysis more rigorous, because in practice, the wind speed may be time varying. The results of the simulation indicate that the path following system has a good performance and is robust against wind disturbances.