Development of autonomous flight control system for 50m unmanned airship

The unmanned airship has a capability of autonomous flight, navigation and guidance based on a telemetry command of the ground control station. In particular the unmanned airship has the peculiar characteristics of a long-duration station keeping within the given boundary compared to the UAV or fixed wing aircraft. Under these circumstances the autonomous flight control system (AFCS) is a critical system and plays a key role in achieving the given requirements and missions. The main functions of AFCS consist of three categories. First, it controls all flight operation modes and unmanned airship dynamics by the autopilot system and control laws. Second, it delivers telecommand and telemetric information between the ground control station and the onboard communication system. Finally it manages and operates a subsystem such as the electric system, propulsive system and pressurization system. In this paper, we introduce the overall design architecture of the main hardware and software of the flight control systems including flight management system (FMS) in a 50 m-long unmanned airship developed by KARI.