Finite Energy Management and Flight Control for a System of Airships Systems

This paper examines the problem of controlling a system of airships that are operating as a temporary mobile cell phone network. The primary requirements are maintaining a formation that is subjected to environmental gust disturbances while holding either a fixed position or attempting to hold a reference velocity. The purpose of having both position and velocity hold modes is to have the performance of an aerostat while maintaining the ability to relocate as required by cell phone load usage. This paper examines the use of a predictive realtime control technique which solves an optimal control problem that takes into account minimum control energy, desired velocity, formation constraints, and control constraints. The control problem is reformulated as a linear programming problem for rapid convergence to a solution. This paper will illustrate the optimal control technique using a simulation on two airships.