Mission path following for an autonomous unmanned airship

The development of an unmanned airship capable of autonomous flight over user-defined locations for aerial data and imagery acquisition is the objective of the AURORA project. One important mission problem is the flight path following of the vehicle through a set of pre-defined points at a given altitude and velocity. In this article, a path tracking error generation methodology is presented and two different strategies for the guidance problem, one based on a H_∞ control technique and another based on a PI control, are proposed and compared through a simulated case study