Design and experimental validation of a controller suite for an autonomous, finless airship

This paper describes the design and experimental validation of a controller suite allowing an unmanned, finless airship to track a series of waypoints autonomously. The control architecture consists of a low-level controller providing attitude and velocity control as well as a high-level controller performing the autonomous trajectory tracking task. The airship equations of motion and the design of the low-level controller are described briefly. Subsequently, the high-level controller design is described in more detail and its performance is evaluated in simulation and experiment. It is found to track the desired waypoints well even in the presence of time-varying wind as an external disturbance.